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Chapter 31

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One key feature of the Bundy murders is the incredible timing that was supposedly involved in Ron Goldman’s death and in Mark Fuhrman’s involvement in the case. Add to that the timing of O.J.’s cut finger, the thumps on Kato’s wall and a few other examples of good and bad timing and you get some powerful reasons for why so many elements from "Premium Steele" got incorporated into Mark Fuhrman’s version of the case. One idea invariably leads to another. If the bulk of your ideas about a murder and a frame-up came from film and television they are bound to show up in the evidence you choose to leave behind and the stories you tell to explain it.

Remington Steel’s defining characteristics include his tendency to equate aspects of his cases to something he saw in the movies. His apartment walls are festooned with posters from old movies and there is hardly an episode of Remington Steele in which he doesn’t draw upon his vast knowledge of the movies to help him solve a mystery. He is therefore more than a little excited about his first purchase of a top-of-the-line VCR, notwithstanding his frustration with trying to assemble it.

While VCR’s were available to a few people and institutions with a lot of money since the 1960s, the quality of the product did not come up and the price did not go down enough to make them widely available to the public until a few years into the ’80s. Still, they were not as easy to hook up and operate as most people would have liked, owing, in no small part, to the thick, hard to follow owner’s manuals that came with them. Steele’s difficulty in following his 1985 owner’s manual was, therefore, something that many people could relate to.

Steele needed an expert to help him with his VCR hookup. He gets it with James Staley (Glenn Goodman in "The Morning Show" episode of Murphy Brown – ’89) as Lester Shane. After Laura Holt questions Steele about his use of company funds to purchase the VCR, she introduces him to Shane. "What seems to be the problem," asks Steel?" Shane replies, "I’m dead."

Lester Shane’s appearance in conjunction with the VCR on Steele’s desk should remind you of the Ghost videotape that Mark Fuhrman said he found in O.J.’s VCR. Fuhrman said that he believed jealousy, not spouse abuse, was O.J. Simpson’s motive for murder. He said that the Bundy murders were sparked by a love triangle between O.J., Nicole and Goldman. He falsely characterized Ghost as a movie about "love, jealousy and murder." That’s what Othello is about. Ghost is about love, greed and murder. There is no love triangle in Ghost. The murder comes about as the result of Tony Goldwyn’s character Carl Bruner trying to obtain a codebook with the access number to an account for laundered drug money.

If you follow the money trail in the Bundy murders you will find that most of it leads to Faye Resnick, Denise Brown and Mark Fuhrman, thee of the five people necessary to carry out the frame-up of O.J. Simpson. You will also find that it is not a direct payoff like a large insurance settlement naming them as beneficiaries. Instead, it’s an indirect payoff in the form of million-dollar book deals and a "charitable foundation." Something very similar is responsible for the fraudulent report of Lester Shane’s death in "Premium Steele." What can anyone expect to gain from faking Shane’s death? That’s the mystery.

The confusion began for Shane when he went to LA on business and his appointments kept getting canceled because his business contacts thought he was dead. You get the first big clue that "Premium Steele" is going to have a lot of connections to Mark Fuhrman’s version of the Bundy murders when Shane purchases a newspaper from a vending box on the parkway of a busy street. As he crosses the street in a daze a white Ford truck with a front end that looks much like a Bronco has to make a sudden stop to avoid hitting him. Shane drops a section of the paper in front of the truck. It falls to the ground in a curl that makes it look like a white, painted stick.

The item in the LA paper that has arrested Shane’s attention is his obituary. That’s why his business contacts think he’s dead. It’s an obvious mistake that Laura and Steel think he can straighten out on his own without much trouble. They hadn’t counted on the power of the press and its rigid, bureaucratic nature. Because of the obituary no one would believe him. The paper wouldn’t listen to him because they had a copy of his death certificate. To top it off, someone called his home and gave the people there the news. He tells Laura and Steel ruefully, "If I drive real fast I might make it back in time for my memorial service."

"Kind of a snowball effect, eh?" observes Laura.

This is what happened with the first news reports that pointed to O.J. as a murderer. The media accepted the official version of the facts without bothering to examine the evidence to the contrary. No matter what O.J. said or did in his defense the media simply pointed to the evidence and kept right on going. Wherever O.J.’s story deviated from the information they were given by the police and the DA’s office the media insinuated that O.J. was lying. Commentators and late night comedians ridiculed what O.J. said (whether he said it or not) and the more he protested his innocence the more they presented "evidence" that said he was lying. Never mind the fact that much of what they reported to get them started proved to be grossly exaggerated or just plain wrong, the story of O.J. the spouse-abuser and murder just kept getting bigger. The snowball effect.

An uncredited actress who looks and sounds an awful lot like Mimi de Jour, the showgirl in Police Squad!, is Miss Carter, the newspaper obituary writer in "Premium Steele." When Laura and Steele give her their assurance that Lester Shane is alive, she blithely "proves" that they are wrong by showing them Shane’s death certificate that was sent to her by Weil Mortuary. Weil Mortuary asked her to place the obituary. Another thing you might find interesting about Miss Carter in light of the phone calls made by a woman (or two woman) asking about the two bodies on Bundy before there were two bodies on Bundy, is the obituary she wrote for Remington Steele. When he asks her about the premature write-up on his death, she tells him that it’s standard practice with prominent people in case they suddenly buy the farm. She tells Steele that she had a devil of a time finding background information on him.

"Standard practice" is a key to this mystery as well as the one on Bundy.

Laura and Steele want a copy of the death certificate but Miss Carter won’t give it to them because she says it’s against the policy of the company. What follows is a simple demonstration of how any system safeguarded by official policy to keep information (or physical evidence) secure can be easily circumvented by the human factor. You also want to look for an allusion to the three-way sex scene that Faye Resnick set up then bailed out on for the 12^th with Ron, Nicole and herself….

Steele tells Miss Carter that he will have dinner with her to tell her more about himself if she will give him a copy of the death certificate. He does so leaning into her with a soft voice and a smile that promises much more. She thinks it over for about a second and a half and gives him her copy. Once outside of Miss Carter’s office, Laura says, "You’re not really planning on taking that poor girl to dinner, are you?" Steel puts an arm around Laura and replies, "We’ll make it a threesome."

Steele visits Dr. Carl Rossfeld the medical examiner. He’s doing an autopsy. Steel is on the other side of the wall trying to talk to him through a window. Rossfeld shows Steele his bloody gloves. Steele tells him, "It’s not imperative that we shake hands," and the doctor takes the gloves off and meets with him. Steele shows Rossfeld his name on Shane’s death certificate and asks him if he recalls signing it. The doctor says he couldn’t have because he was at a conference in northern California when the certificate was signed (Fuhrman said that he was at a seminar 150 miles north of Bundy). He claims it’s a forgery.

By the way, in an early 1986 episode of Moonlighting called "In God, We Strongly Suspect" J.A. Preston, the black actor who plays Det. Oscar Grace in Body Heat is the LA medical examiner who fakes a man’s death – and then murders him. So, if you’re looking for a detective as well as black killer with initials for a name who can substitute for the medical examiner with bloody gloves in "Premium Steele," you’ve got him.

Less than one minute after Dr. Rossfeld (Miguel Ferrer is Dr. Albert Rosenfield in Twin Peaks) puts down his bloody gloves the scene shifts to Laura pulling her white Volkswagen Rabbit (Playboy logo) to a stop in front of the Weil Mortuary. The door is locked. The place doesn’t appear to have been occupied in a long time (Fuhrman found cobwebs on the narrow path by Kato’s room between the wall and the cyclone fence just beyond the window-mounted air conditioner). Laura finds a small opening between the corner of the building and a cyclone fence. She walks cautiously to the side of the building along a narrow path.

A ringing phone catches Laura’s attention. She peeks through the window where the ringing seems to be coming from and sees a room full of office furniture and women "up to their necks in paperwork." Two women are at their desks talking on the telephone (Kato was on the phone in his room talking to a woman when he heard the thumps on his wall). A man accosts Laura and gives her evasive answers to her question about Weil and what the women in the building are doing. She departs learning only that the mortuary has been closed for two years.

Laura meets with Steele in his office where they compare notes. The only thing Laura is sure of is the fact that someone wants to create the illusion that Lester Shane is dead. You’re probably ahead of me here with the mixing and matching of scenes in the Bundy case with "Premium Steele" and "Stronger Than Steele" in which Laura recalls the "Playback" episode of Columbo with Oskar Werner. There, the key to a frame-up and an alibi is an illusion of time. In the Bundy murder case the illusion that Ron and Nicole were dead when they were still alive was created by two phone calls made close together in time by a woman or two women before Ron and Nicole were killed.

Laura’s focus is on the Shane case, but Steele is preoccupied with his VCR. Laura gets him back on track by promising to buy him "…the complete MGM library on videocassette if you will please put that thing down and concentrate on the business at hand." He instantly slams the cover on the VCR and says, "D.O.A. Edmond O’Brien, Luther Adler, United Artist 1949. O’Brien plays a businessman who comes to the police to report a murder – his own." He left out Beverly Garland, possibly because she’s Laura Holt’s mother in Remington Steele. In D.O.A. she’s the accomplice in a murder that was made to look like a suicide – the illusion of a suicide.

In writing of the Mercedes Benz incident in Murder in Brentwood, Fuhrman adds something that wasn’t in his ’89 report. After Nicole declined to file a spouse abuse charge against O.J. (for yelling at her and smashing the windshield of his car with a baseball bat) he said that he told her, "It’s your life." He said that he was trying to convey to her the "desperate" situation she was in. In other words, by not signing the complaint she was committing suicide. The contradiction in the fact that Fuhrman says O.J. killed her after she made out the complaint that occasioned his 1989 letter to the city attorney was never explained.

Steele admits to a fuzzy D.O.A. connection to Lester Shane. "Available on videocassette," he says. "Buy a copy, look at it. Run it. See where it leads us." Judging by Mark Fuhrman’s comments in Murder in Brentwood about visiting the video rental store, he rented a lot of videos. I followed scores of them that lead to Mark Fuhrman as the killer of Ron Lyle Goldman and Nicole Brown Simpson.

Laura figures that Lester Shane’s death certificate and obituary is some kind of life insurance scam. She calls him into Steel’s office and asks him is he has life insurance. He doesn’t. Steele sees another angle and asks him whether he is happily married. Shane replies, "Happy as anyone can be after twenty-two years of marriage. "Gaslight," says Steele. "Charles Boyer, Ingrid Bergman, MGM 1944. Boyer attempts to drive Ingrid Bergman crazy so he can have her committed and finally gain her estate. Also available on videocassette." The analogy doesn’t work because everything Lester Shane has is already in his wife’s name.

Shane sees the VCR on Steele’s desk and seems to know all about it. He was an electrical engineer in the Army. Steele decides that Shane should be in "protective custody" at his place. He brings the VCR with him. On the way they nearly get run over by a car. Steele hurls the VCR at the car smashing the windshield and the VCR. Steele gets the limo driver to take him to a warehouse run by his old friend from London, Monroe. Richard Lawson (Det. Hawthorne in The Days and Nights of Molly Dodd –‘89-‘91, Dr. Taylor in V - ’83 with Faye Grant) is Monroe. No one, including Remington Steel knows his real name. Monroe calls him Mick. In England they were partners in crime. In the States, Steele lent Monroe some money when he was down on his luck and Monroe used it to start his electrical appliance business.

Monroe promises to get Steele a new VCR and a four-foot television set. He gets on the phone and tells a man name Oscar to take care of the new VCR. He tells Steele that his television set is being installed as they speak. Steele says he doesn’t remember giving Monroe the key to his apartment. Monroe tells him that he knows how busy he is and that he shouldn’t be bothered with "mundane details."

The attempt to run down Steele and Shane makes Laura realize that they are on to something big – something worth killing for. Remember the narrow path where Laura heard the phone ring, looked through the window, and saw the women doing office work? Laura and Steele return to the same window at night dressed in their standard B and E outfits, black jump suits, rubber-souled shoes and black leather gloves. Laura has a flashlight. Steel uses a jimmy to open the window. Laura uses a stick to prop it up. They go inside. The place is deserted.

Now they know the mortuary that sent Lester Shane’s death certificate to the paper and had them run his obituary is a front, Laura’s attention swings back to the medical examiner. To get a copy of his signature she disguises herself with glasses and a package delivery service uniform and drops by unexpectedly that night at Dr. Rossfeld’s home. Chewing a large wad of gum and giving her company’s "On time, anytime, every time" motto as an excuse for the lateness of her visit she gives him an envelope and asks him to sign for it. He does. She leaves. He looks in the envelope and finds a VCR buyer’s guide.

Laura and Steel return to Steele’s flat where Doris Roberts as Mildred their secretary comes out of Steele’s bedroom. Shane has been trying unsuccessfully to hook up the VCR. Mildred tells Steele that he has the wrong VCR manual. Laura compares Dr. Rossfeld’s signature on the package delivery release form with the one on the death certificate. They match. What’s more, Mildred has learned that Rossfeld has vast land holdings and a number of huge cash accounts and Weil Mortuary is owned by a company called Perennial.

Surmising that the illusion of Lester Shane’s death created by Dr. Rossfeld and the Weil Mortuary is part of a much bigger scam, Laura tells Steele to pay another visit to Rossfeld. She decides to investigate Perennial herself and wants Mildred to check on the people who had obituaries placed by Weil Mortuary in the past two years while it was closed. Suddenly she finds herself alone. Shane has managed to get sound. but he cannot go any further because there is a compatibility problem in the hook-up.

Steele’s first stop is Monroe’s warehouse where he complains to his old friend about his problems with the VCR. Monroe promises him that he will send over his best man to set everything up and make sure that it’s working the way it’s supposed to.

Laura stops by the office of banker and investment broker Norman Maxwell, an old flame of hers who is still carrying the torch. If the name Laura Holt wasn’t enough of a connection to Laura Hart for you, try this line from Norman Maxwell… He asks Laura, "How can I win back your heart?"

Mark Withers (Billy Compton in Death of a Centerfold –’81, the true story of Playboy playmate Dorothy Stratton whose jealous boyfriend blew her head off with a shotgun) is Norman Maxwell. On a shelf behind his seat you can see a statuette of a man on a bronco. Norman tells Laura that Perennial is a conglomerate corporation with holding in "fast food" (O.J.’s Orenthal Enterprises owned a fast food chain), insurance and a dozen other companies. He went to business school with the president of Perennial Phil Leighton (Fuhrman went to Robbery detective school with his friend Ron Phillips). They are friends and Norman arranges for Laura to meet him.

While Laura is with Norman, Steele goes to see Dr. Rossfeld at the county morgue and finds him on an autopsy table, the victim of a hit and run driver. He returns to the Remington Steele office with the news. Laura is not there. But soon after he arrives a woman comes in. Mildred introduces her as "Clair Johnson the first of the dead people." She is followed by a parade of people from out of town whose obituaries were placed in the paper by Weil Mortuary when it was no longer in business.

Laura is talking to Phil Leighton the president of Perennial. He says that Perennial purchased the Weil Mortuary building along with other buildings in the area as a simple real estate investment. He agrees that Laura’s experience with Weil is odd and tells her that he will look into it.

When Laura gets back to her office she is dumbfounded by the fact that Steele has brought eight "dead people" into town, booked them into a hotel and supplied them with limousine service at company expense. Steele assures her that it’s the only way to go. The number of people they found confirms the fact that whatever is going on with Shane is much bigger than his case alone. She asks, "What have we stumbled onto here?" To which Steele answers, "The List of Adrian Messenger, George C. Scott, Kirk Douglas, Universal 1963. Fine film, incidentally, available on videocassette. A number of names appear on a list with no apparent connection. Scott finds the connection, stops the killer."

Laura asks, "What’s the connection."

Steele says, "They were all in a World War Two prisoner of war camp together."

Laura is not impressed.

Steele makes the essential point. "Look Laura, he says, "the eight people out there all share something in common, something worth murdering for." So it is with the Goldman/Simpson murders and the movies and TV shows in the Fuhrman collection. All of the essential ideas are in the collection with hardly a detail from one screenplay or teleplay that isn’t filled in with names, locations, themes, motives, props, methods of operation or plot points from others in the collection. Most of them were available on videocassetteat some time before the Bundy murders .

Violent deaths associated with elevators or a space the size of an elevator (like Ron and Nicole on Bundy) and someone who is killed just because he or she is in the wrong place at the wrong time are recurring themes. They are as common as broken car windows, image assassinations, bomb blasts and socks on a rug or by a fireplace. The "Premium Steele" episode of Remington Steele has all of that and more.

Steele and Shane take an elevator to Steele’s floor. They are exhausted from their unsuccessful attempts all day to find a connection between the people whose names appeared in obituaries placed by the Weil Mortuary. The elevator door opens to a young black man named Rudy in the hallway picking the lock on Steele’s apartment door. The young man smiles, "Relax," he says, "Monroe sent me." He puts the pick in the lock and the door explodes, killing him instantly.

Want a direct connection to O.J. and Bundy? Steele dismantles a bomb that was set to go off when she opened the door to Laura's loft. He tells her that he booked them into a hotel on Olympic and Bundy. O.J. was a commentator for the Los Angeles Summer Olympics in 1984.

The next stop for Steele is Monroe’s apartment to give him the bad news. Monroe is sitting in a chair next to a fireplace with his shoes off reading a book when the doorbell rings. When he goes to the door you can see that he is wearing black socks. Monroe is heartbroken to hear about his 18-year-old employee Rudy "a good kid full of sauce," like Ron Goldman. Looking back over the wild and dangerous lives that he and Steele had before they turned legitimate, Monroe asks why it couldn’t have been one of them, instead of Rudy. If Rudy hadn’t been in the wrong place at the wrong time it would have been Steele and Shane.

Timing was also the key to what happened to Shane. Of all the days he picked to come to town he chose the day in which his name appeared in on the obituary page of the newspaper. Had he arrived a day earlier nothing would have happened. A few days later the paper would have been consigned to the trash and his obituary might have gone unnoticed or been written off as a mistake. The other eight people in Shane’s situation had no way of knowing about their obituaries until Mildred called them and arranged for them to come to LA.

Laura still thinks the obituaries have something to do with insurance even though Lester Shane has told them he doesn’t have any. She asks the other eight "dead people" if they have insurance. Some do. Some don’t. Steele says, "So much for Double Indemnity." Then when Laura mentions Perennial, one of the dead people who has insurance says that he almost took out a policy with Perennial. He went so far as to fill out the ten-page application but he moved out of town and went with another company. Shane filled out an application with Perennial, too. That was the common denominator. All of them had filled out applications for Perennial Life Insurance but none of them had taken it and none of them can figure out what it means because it didn’t cost them anything.

Remington Steel was closer to the truth than he thought with the World War Two prisoners of war in The List of Adrian Messenger. The bombing should have been his big clue. In Target Unknown (’43) American airmen in German hands go into their interrogations separately, expecting the worst as German prisoners of war. Determined to give only their name rank and serial number, they are blindsided by kind treatment and questions that don’t seem to have anything to do with military intelligence. Each of them reveals apparently innocuous information that the Germans piece together to learn what the next big allied bombing target is going to be – something that the American airmen didn’t know themselves.

The frame-up of O.J. Simpson required the cooperation of many people who didn’t know what was going on. With a little unofficial cooperation here, a little press leak there and a little white lie here and there to help the police and prosecution, the combined effect was a "mountain of evidence" against O.J. Simpson. A mountain of bogus evidence.

In the end Laura learns from her friend Norman Maxwell that Perennial was using a twist on the idea of taking names off of tombstones to establish new identities and using the birth certificates of the deceased. Perennial was running a multi-million-dollar fraud operation by using death certificates of the living to fake their deaths and collect on the insurance policies they sold to other companies. Norman explains that the buying and selling of insurance polices is standard industry practice and the companies who bought the polices from Perennial paid them the benefits with the expectation that they would pass them on to the beneficiaries. Perennial pocketed the money.

Before Laura could find that out she had to tap into Perennial’s database on all of its insurance polices. To do that she had to get into the office of President Phil Leighton. To do that she needed a diversion.

Cathy Randa was O.J.’s secretary. Remember the package that Fuhrman said he saw in O.J.’s Bronco, "Orenthal Enterprises: Attention Cathy"? Of course you do. Remember Fuhrman’s story of the broken glass in the Mercedes that helped to tarnish O.J.’s image when he was accused of murder? Of course you do. Would it surprise you to see allusions to both of these stories in "Premium Steele?" …I didn’t think so.

Sitting in his office, Phil Leighton gets a call from his secretary Cathy. It seems that someone has broken into his Mercedes Benz. He goes to the outer office where Steel and Monroe are standing in front of Cathy’s desk. Steel introduces himself as a police detective and flashes a badge. He tells Leighton that he caught Monroe inside of his car and dumps a brown leather satchel full of audiotapes onto Cathy’s desk. Leighton confirms that the tapes are his.

Monroe protests his innocence in the style of a stereotypical black street hustler. All in all, it’s a convincing show made more convincing by how much you believe in racial stereotypes. It’s the same technique Fuhrman used in his letter to the city attorney to describe O.J. attitude toward Nicole when he saw her crying and spotted the "shattered" windshield.

Monroe’s act goes to a new level when Steele proceeds to take him and Leighton outside to the scene of the crime. On their way to the elevator a blond woman with a suit jacket over a black dress gets out chewing gum and walks past them. Monroe reaches back and pats her on the rear end. Steel hustles him into the elevator as the woman walks by a leafy green plant shaking her head in disgust.

The woman passes Laura dressed as a hippie cleaning lady. Laura is going to get interrupted before she can finish downloading the files from Leighton’s computer. There is gong to be a fight. The good guys are going to win. Shane is going to get Steele’s VCR working in a fully restored apartment and Norman is going to go down the tubes with Perennial, but not before Steele and Monroe finish their act.

With Monroe cuffed to his writs, Steele takes Leighton to his car. Sure enough the evidence of the alleged crime is overwhelming. The widow is shattered., Leighton’s tapes are on his secretary’s desk put there by the detective who saw the suspect in his car. Monroe’s story and the way he tells it is the next best thing to a confession of guilt. He says, "So I sees this suspicious looking dude toying with the window here and I says, ‘What you’re doing here is dishonest.’" When Steel gets Leighton’s assurance that nothing else is missing he tells him that they have to go back and collect the evidence. He grabs Monroe by his vest and shoves him ahead. Monroe protests the "detective’s" humiliating public treatment of him. "Hey!" he cries. Whatcha doin’ man? I got my professional reputation to think of – my image."

Contact the author: Jasper Garrison
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