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Chapter 8

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The more I learned about the real life inner workings of the American criminal justice system the more apparent it became that most of the frame-ups Ben Matlock exposed on TV would have worked in real life. I have lived in Detroit since 1948. I have seen police and prosecutors lying, cheating and manufacturing evidence. Yet, I don’t know of a single case in the history of the Detroit Police Department where a cop or prosecutor has been charged, let alone prosecuted, for planting evidence or lying to secure a conviction. In other big cities police and prosecutors have been caught playing the frame game so rarely that news of such an event in the entire USA gets reported only once or twice a decade. When they do get caught, the circumstances are so blatant that you wonder how they could have been so stupid as to think they could get away with it.

Now that I have a good grip on how the system works in every major metropolitan area of the country I know that they weren’t stupid, just unlucky. They were working with odds of thousands to one in their favor. People don’t normally get arrested for a serious crime unless the police can show some credible evidence that they did it. The defendant naturally claims that he was falsely identified, that witnesses against him are lying or that evidence he cannot give a logical explanation for was planted. These routine arguments are usually bogus and all criminal justice system professionals know it. What gives lying and cheating cops and prosecutors their edge is the consistency with which nearly everyone in the system plays the odds regardless of the evidence and suppresses evidence of official misconduct when it is uncovered.

In "The Foursome" episode of Matlock, first broadcast a week before Christmas, 1991, Amy Stock (a.k.a. Amy Stock-Poynton) as assistant DA. Lauren Richmond sees a chance to make the big time in her first murder case. The accused is Ellis Blake, one of the richest men in the world. The victim is a golf caddie who wanted to marry his daughter. Blake argues with him in front of three men on a country club golf course. He calls him a "gold digger" and offers to pay him $10,000 to get lost. Assistant DA Richmond believes Blake is guilty because of a murder scene strewn with $10,000 in $50 bills, Blake’s lack of an alibi plus the murder weapon, his .22 revolver found by police in the glove compartment of his car. The gun is tagged for identification by Lt. Bob Brooks played by David Froman.

Did you get all of that? The rich defendant, the argument on the golf course, the "gold," the "digger," the .22 revolver, the $50 bills all over the scene where the caddie got shot, the weapon "tagged" by "Froman"?

O.J. was rich enough to leave evidence on the murder scene that implicated a rich man. He played golf five days a week. Mitch Mesco, a caddie at the Country Club where O.J. played on the morning of the 12^th claimed that O.J. cursed angrily at a man in his foursome whom O.J. said falsely accused him of jangling his keys at a strategic moment to make him hit a bad shot. In "The Foursome," Mitch Ryder is Ellis Blake, the man falsely accused of shooting the caddie.

Could "The Foursome" have triggered Mesco’s associated ideas? Could it have done likewise with the man who killed Ron Goldman and Nicole Brown Simpson? Why not? The gold part of Blake’s argument is the first syllable of Goldman and the "digger" is the shovel that Fuhrman suggested O.J. planned to use to bury the bodies. The inside diameter of a gun barrel (the caliber) is measured with a decimal point in front of the number. Blake’s revolver would therefore be written .22, as in twenty-two cents. One LAPD photo on the driveway behind Nicole’s garage shows twenty-two cents. The $50 bills feature the lithographed portrait of Ulysses Simpson Grant. Brooks tells McMasters that the killer left in such a hurry that he didn’t have time to pick up the evidence of his guilt.

To save you the trouble of looking back at what I wrote about the .22 revolver in "The Captain," I’ll repeat it, here. Fuhrman "tagged" the Bundy murder weapon as a Swiss Army knife by the recess in an empty Swiss Army knife box (empty revolver chamber) in O.J.’s bathroom. The perfect fit in the ballistics test comes from the rifling in the barrel.

In real life, a man like Ellis Blake charged with murder would be big news like O.J., one of the most popular celebrities in the world, being charged with murder. If he claimed he was framed and hired one of the most famous and successful lawyers in the country to defend him, every aspect of the case would be news for as long as the contest lasted.

My program guide synopsis of "The Foursome" mentioned prosecutor misconduct. I taped the show looking for a character that resembled Marcia Clark. I saw in Assistant DA Lauren Richmond someone who looked more like Assistant DA Cheri Lewis. There is some of Marcia in her character, especially where she lies and encourages witnesses to lie, but her style is more akin to Cheri Lewis’. Assistant District Attorney Lewis led the prosecution’s fight to suppress all evidence of racially motivated conduct by Fuhrman in the Marine Corps and in the LAPD.

Lauren Richmond appears early in "The Foursome" with effusive praise for her courtroom adversary Ben Matlock. She told him that she’d studied all of his cases and singled out one brilliant defense strategy he had used 25 years before in a case called People vs. Baker. She thereby demonstrated that she did her homework and paid close attention to details. She knew more about Ben Matlock than she did about his client’s case because the murder had just occurred the night before.

You may know Amy Stock as "Missy," Bill Preston’s young, ditzy stepmother in Bill and Ted’s excellent Adventure (’89). In Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey (’91) her Electra complex is pretty much confirmed when she divorces Bill’s dad and marries Ted’s dad.

In "The Foursome" Amy Stock is all business as Lauren Richmond, who only pretends to be in awe of the venerable Ben Matlock. When it comes to the bail hearing you see that she prepared well to anticipate his every move. She beats him to the punch and counters every well-worn argument he makes with a better one that she tailored perfectly to fit the moment. Later, in the office of her supervisor Julie Marsh, Ben tells Julie, "She went right for my throat." Just then, Lauren appears, framed in the open door with a picture of the Marines’ flag raising on Iwo Jima’s Mt. Suribachi on the wall in back of her. She claims, "beginner’s luck."

If you know as much about Marine Corps history as a former marine knows, particularly a war and history buff trained in artistic composition, you know that the Iwo flag-raising picture was no lucky shot. It came from several takes of a moving picture sequence posed and rehearsed by the participants – which takes nothing away from the power of the photo but belies the myth of a spontaneous moment luckily caught on film. The only thing lucky about that photo was the presence of a genius on hand to put the picture in his head on film.

If you can put aside the moral implications of one set of powerfully evocative images over another, you can see what the Iwo flag-rising picture has in common with other powerful pictures. I’m talking about the posed Mathew Brady photo of the dead Confederate soldier in Gettysburg’s Devil’s Den. I’m talking about Paul Conrad’s brilliant composition in his cartoon of the swastika flag rising from the rubble of the Berlin Wall. I’m talking about the photo of Mark Fuhrman pointing to the bloody glove – or the photo of Nicole’s body at the foot of her stairs. Take your pick. I’m talking about the eye of an artist and all of the little adjustments an artist makes by habit to get a picture just right.

Evidence on Bundy was "adjusted," but not in any way that could seriously be called random. The glove, the envelope, the cap, the bloody heel print and Goldman’s boot appear in different relationships to each other in different photos. But somehow, they all crowd together in a way that puts everything incriminating to O.J. Simpson in an ideal relationship to each other around Mark Fuhrman’s pointing finger. They couldn’t have been arranged better by an artist. A similar phenomenon occurred with the photos of the coins on the driveway near the garbage cans, the garage door, the garage gate, the tire of Nicole’s Jeep and the last blood drop on the ground. In some pictures there were two coins, a dime and a penny. In one of those pictures the coins are almost on top of each other. In another picture they are spread noticeably apart. That’s not the most peculiar thing about those coins. Someone took away a second dime and a second penny to get the photos of eleven cents. Another photo shows two dimes and two pennies, twenty-two cents.

Mark Fuhrman, a man with an eye for details and composition, offered no explanation for the different amounts and the different arrangements of the coins. He didn’t give a specific monetary value or name either denomination. He just called them "coins." He explained them in a composite theory of the way Det. Brooks (Mr. Froman) in "The Foursome" explains the $50 bills scattered all over the murder scene and the way Lauren Richmond explains a golf ball marker found in the back of the dead man’s house. Fuhrman said that the killer fled in a panic, which is why he left the cap and glove. He said that the coins fell to the ground when the killer reached into his pocket for his keys and turned the pockets of his pants inside out.

Fuhrman lamented the ineptitude of the lead detectives who took over from him for not collecting and fingerprinting the money next to the blood drop to see if they matched O.J. Simpson’s. I am fairly confidant that they would have if O.J. had checked a dime or a penny into safekeeping at a lockup where Fuhrman had friends. There was one insurmountable problem with that scenario. Fuhrman had no control over the coins that would be in O.J.’s possession or where and when O.J. would be arrested. Only in the times and places that Fuhrman did have control do you see evidence that incriminates O.J.

The blood drops on Bundy were left in an area where Fuhrman had control. Most people reject that idea with contempt for the notion that it was possible to plant the blood that tested positive for O.J.’s before O.J.’s blood was taken. It was not only possible; it was easy. You see the principle, as well as Fuhrman’s story of the change in "The Foursome" episode of Matlock when Ellis Blake goes to jail and checks his personal affects into safekeeping. You see him take off his watch (O.J. and Nicole wore Swiss Army watches) and hand over his money clip full of $50 bills and his wallet as the jailer calls off each item. The camera then goes to the counter where Blake plunks down his keys, a handful of change that includes two dimes and two pennies, and three distinctive golf ball markers. The jailer picks up one of the ball markers and asks, "What are these things?" When Blake tells him he continues, "O.K., ball markers, keys and change." He doesn’t say how much change.

Have you ever noticed how close O.K. is to O.J.? You would if you were focused on O.J. Anyhow, a ball marker identical to Blake’s shows up in the rear of the victim’s townhouse and three fifty-dollar bills taken from the fifties on the murder scene test positive for Blake’s fingerprints.

Do you see how it was done? I did. If you have already figured out how easy it was to plant "O.J.’s blood" on Bundy, you know, too. The principle is identical – and that’s not all.

Here’s a hint: How do you know the money samples in "The Foursome" that were tested for fingerprints came from the murder scene? You don’t, any more than Ben Matlock did before he learned that Lauren Richmond secretly purchased one ball marker identical to Blake’s after she learned that he had three of them in his pocket when he was locked up. Yes, the bills were collected from the murder scene before Blake gave his to his jailers, but the samples weren’t tested until after both sample of money were available to Richmond to make a switch. That’s what she did. She took three of Blake’s fifties from his money clip and replaced them with three of her own. She took three fifties of the two hundred fifties that were collected from the murder scene. She put Blake’s bills in their place. She called Lt. Brooks (a.k.a. Mr. Froman) to check all of the money for Blake’s fingerprints.

Froman/ Fuhrman/ fingerprints. I call this chapter Code Breakers because of the specific references it has to things I could only talk about before as metaphors or generalities that seemed to fit a logical pattern for where the Bundy killer’s ideas came from or how they were reinforced. The Cara link to Mary Steenburgen and Tombstone Pizza in Back to the Future III was one code breaker. The items and the arrangement of the items at the feet of Annie Chapman in the 1988 BBC move Jack The Ripper with Michael Caine represented another. The Matlock series has scores of them. Some episodes, like "The Captain" and "Mr. Awesome," have many. "The Foursome" falls squarely into that category.

The two hundred $50 bills scattered throughout the murder scene in "The Foursome" give us another code breaker. This is more than a metaphor for Nicole Brown Simpson’s blood. And the three $50 bills that Lauren Richmond filches from Ellis Blake’s stored belongings are more than a metaphor for the blood drops on Bundy identified as O.J.’s.

You get a better understanding of what I mean when you learn how Matlock proved that the assistant DA made the switch. It wasn’t enough for him to show that she had access to the money samples when a switch could have occurred to implicate his client. He had to show that there must have been a switch and she was the only one who could have done it. He did that by smoking out the real killer’s banker and having all of the money checked for the banker's fingerprints. The only bills that didn’t have them were the three bills with Ellis Blake’s fingerprints on them. The banker’s name was Karen Brown. Ulysses Simpson Grant (the guy on the fifty) led the Union Army in the bloodiest war in American history. He commanded the bloodiest battles and sent the most men to their deaths in the shortest amount of time (Cold Harbor Virginia) in his drive to topple the Confederate seat of government in Richmond Virginia.

"The Foursome's" $50 bill in the context of a battle in the Deep South with someoned named Richmond is therefore uniquely associated with blood.

The absences of Ms. Brown’s fingerprints on the Ulysses Simpson Grant bills that Blake left with the authorities tie them uniquely to Orenthal James. Simpson. O.J.’s connection to the coins with the fifties, the watch and the golf ball markers in the same six-second frame, is even more obvious. O.J. was preparing for a trip to Chicago to play golf when Ron and Nicole were murdered. He undoubtedly had ball markers in his pocket at some time that day. One of Blake’s golfing buddies is Tom Nevel. The real killer’s false alibi is that he was with Nevel’s wife Caroline. Ben Matlock asks Nevel and the other members of the foursome about their alibis. He asks Blake, who said he was driving from Columbus, if he stopped to help a woman in distress or to buy gas. Fuhrman claimed to have been having an affair with Nicole. A rumor had it that he felt guilty for not protecting her from O.J. One of his alibis is that he was driving home from La Quinta and stopped to buy gas. Another of his alibis is that he was at home with his wife Caroline.

About an hour before the murders O.J. bought food at McDonalds at a drive-through window. It is, therefore, likely that he got change. More importantly, it’s likely that the killer made that assumption as he was laying down the last clues for the detectives and fine-tuning them in his role as a detective for the camera of police photographer Rolf Rokahr.

Look again at the coins on Nicole’s driveway and the ones Blake leaves with his jailers. Look at them through the prism of the 1982 Police Squad! television series’ opening credits. All six episodes begin with ridiculous, six to ten second scenes introducing Leslie Nielsen, Alan North and "Rex Hamilton as Abraham Lincoln." In this version of what happened in the President’s box (Mary the boxer’s wife) of Ford’s Theater, Abe and Mary have their backs to the stage when the President somehow gets his hat shot off with two bullets fired into the bunting of the rail behind him. He wheels and fires two shots of his own. The real Abe Lincoln was killed with one shot from a .44.

Alexander (Rex backward) Hamilton and Abraham Lincoln have two well-known things in common. Both were killed with single-shot pistols and their pictures appear on paper money – Hamilton on a $10 bill and Lincoln on a five. Look what happens when you add a zero to the five. You get a fifty with Ulysses S. Grant. Put a decimal point in front of the ten and you get ten cents with Franklin D. Roosevelt (Frank Drebin).

This isn’t a guess at what the killer might have thought when he planted the twenty-two cents next to the blood drop then changed his mind while the photos were still being taken and left eleven cents instead. It’s a catalogue of relevant facts and patterns that can’t be attributed to chance and can’t be ignored when considering the many influences involved in both decisions. You see others in The Hotel New Hampshire with Rob Lowe and Mathew Modine as high school football players. Lowe wears number 22, the number of a running back like O.J. Modine is 11. That’s the number of a quarterback who is also the team’s captain, as in Isiah Thomas of the Detroit Pistons basketball team and the fictional Ed Hanna of the Atlanta Police Department.

Other doubles in the movies, include the news clip of Fuhrman shooting hoops with a black guy wearing Isiah Thomas’ basketball jersey. Between Bundy and Rockingham you have two victims, two sets of shoe prints, two gloves, two socks, two sets of dimes, two sets of pennies and two sets of pictures showing twenty-two cents in one and eleven cents in another. It is not entirely coincidental that The Naked Gun’s plot revolves around the assassination of a queen. All of the funnybusiness that went on with a twenty-dollar bill (Andrew Jackson) might have told us that the assassin was baseball superstar Reggie Jackson, number 44. In the movies you have strategically placed actors with double "M" initials. You have Mathew Modine in The Hotel New Hampshire and Michael Madsen in A House in the Hills. In the videos of Rockingham on the 13^th, you have Mark Fuhrman’s 9-mm pistol – the one he used in 1987 to put five bullet holes in an ATM robber he caught in the act on a stakeout.

Joseph Britton had a bad habit of threatening ATM customers with a large butcher knife and taking their money. Fuhrman figured out the pattern he used and set up covert surveillance around an ATM machine where he anticipated Britton would strike next. So far so good, right? Fuhrman is demonstrating all of the qualities you’d want to see in a cop to nail the bad guy. But when Britton runs and tosses the knife away, the good guy/bad guy line begins to blur. I’m not second-guessing Fuhrman’s decision to shoot Britton five times. My problem is with the knife he planted next to his bleeding body. My problem is with the butcher knife on Nicole’s kitchen counter and all of the butcher knives that show up in movies like Candyman with Virginia Madsen as Helen and A House In The Hills with Michael Madsen and Helen Slater.

A large butcher knife had to be linked in Fuhrman’s mind to covert surveillance. Fuhrman, Roberts and Shipp were all experts in covert surveillance. That’s how Fuhrman caught Britton. It beats me why anyone would sneer at the idea that Fuhrman and two other men he called friends could keep tabs on the people they needed to keep tabs on in a murder/frame-up plot without being noticed. Yet they have no trouble picturing O.J. Simpson sneaking around in the dark alone with a dark blue watchman’s cap as a disguise. Do you think it would help if they saw The Naked Gun one more time?

O.J.’s knit cap in The Naked Gun was a code breaker for me, and one of the reasons I call this book and the one before it The Smoking Gun. It was the first thing I could positively identify to explain why so much of the evidence against O.J. looked so familiar. It looked familiar because it was familiar. The only thing more shocking to me than my sudden understanding of why it was so easy for me to picture O.J. wearing the cap to Bundy, was the failure of anyone else I talked to to see why that was important. They saw it as one item out of hundreds that went into their thinking about the case. They saw it as important only because of the hair inside of it that could have been O.J.’s or because it was too clean or because the idea of wearing it for a disguise seemed reasonable or ridiculous.

I saw The Naked Gun cap as a key to unlocking the source of a pattern of clues on Bundy and Rockingham and in the testimony of Mark Fuhrman that had a vague Hollywood ring to it. The double homicide itself was, in effect, a teleplay written by the killer with all of the formula elements of a surefire hit once Fuhrman showed up. He did what all the great detectives of film and television do. He noticed tiny details that everyone else missed. He made the most dramatic discoveries and he proposed the theories that matched the evidence he would later find.

Not since Frank Drebin of Police Squad! has there been a tall, handsome detective associated with a case that had so many double meanings. All Six of the cases Drebin solved in the ’82 series were loaded with double meanings. Even the titles of each Abrams, Zucker and Zucker show came in pairs. The announcer would give one title while you were seeing an entirely different title on the screen. Nicole’s Bruno Magli shoes give her killer’s Bruno Magli shoes the same duel character. The code breaker for the shoes was the pair of nurse’s shoes that Michael Cain wore as the doctor with the split personality in Dressed to Kill.

It finally hit me that doc (as in doctor) and dock (as in Pier 32 where O.J. as Nordberg gets framed with planted heroin) are the same in the Fuhrman collection. This code breaker is in the final Police Squad! episode, "Testimony of Evil" a.k.a. "Dead Men Don’t Laugh," which dovetails into O.J.’s dock scene in The Naked Gun. Drebin is told to pick up a car with a hidden cache of heroine at the docks. That is, the "doc’s," as in the doctor’s office.

Everything said and done in Police Squad! is subject to being taken literally, like Nicole’s habitual expression, "he’s going to kill me" or "she’s going to kill me" whenever she thought that someone would be very angry with her. Half the fun of the show is anticipating what outrageous metaphor or simile you will see next as the real thing. By the time you get to the fifth episode entitled "The Butler Did It" and "A Bird in the Hand," you know what to expect when Tracie and Kingsly agree to meet in the Japanese garden. You see an assortment of Japanese people standing in flowerpots. This is the code breaker for the idea in Swamp Thing that the bunch of flowers Alec Holland pulls from the base of the tree in the swamp and hands to Alice Cable is a metaphor for a human being.

Remember, Alec in the original Swamp Thing doesn’t simply grab the flowers and hand them to Alice. He waits until her back is turned and says, "….something just might jump out and get you," as he jumps out with the flowers. In "A Bird in the Hand’s" Japanese garden scene, a man with leather gloves and a dark blue cap jumps from out of some bushes, grabs Terri from behind and hits Kingsly over the head.

Time out for a few reminders and some pertinent notes about "The Butler Did It/A Bird in the Hand"… Mark Fuhrman’s precinct was on Butler St. Two of his three favorite athletes were George Foreman and Larry Bird. Fuhrman wrote about making a knife handle for an actor who appeared in The Rock. He tied the pennies (Abraham Lincoln) to O.J.’s supposed flight to Rockingham. He made an issue of Sydney Simpson’s birthday. Birthdays in the Fuhrman collection always have some link to Fuhrman, Nicole, Sydney, interracial sex or death. There seems to be no such connection in "The Butler Did It/A Bird in the Hand" until you see that it is directed by Georg Sanford Brown, the black cop in the series The Rookies. He is the "special guest star" (certain death in ten seconds or less) in the second episode of Police Squad! "Ring of Fear/A Dangerous Assignment." He was married to white actress Tyne Daly from 1966-1990. They had three daughters.

Tyne Daly had TV guest appearances as Barbara (Fuhrman’s first wife), Janet (his second wife) and Caroline (his third wife). In a ’92 episode of Swamp Thing she is Carla. In the movies, she has been Kathryn (black football star Marcus Allen’s white wife) and Kathy (the name on the package in the Bronco that Fuhrman shined his flashlight on). In the 1981-’82 TV series Cagney and Lacey she is Mary Beth Lacy (MBL-BML) the LAPD homicide detective who was modeled after Judge Lance Ito’s wife, Captain Peggy York. York suspended Fuhrman for twenty-two days in 1986 over an incident involving Martin Luther King’s birthday. On the McKinney tapes he charges that she "fucked and sucked" her way to the top. Should we then look for a "blow job" connection in "The Butler Did It/A Bird in the Hand." You bet.

By the way, "The Butler Did It/A Bird in the Hand" Is set in the Burton Mansion (BM) on Terri Burton’s birthday. When she bends down to blow out the candles, they stay where they are, still lit and upright and the cake flies off the table. This could be an innocent scene, but given the Zucker Brothers’ record with Elaine and the "automatic pilot in Airplane! (’80) and Jane Spenser’s act with Drebin’s fingertip in The Naked Gun (’88), it does not seem likely.

Teri’s kidnapper demands a ransom from Nicholas Coster as Terri’s father by way of a window frame tossed into a rock garden. The Fuhrman collection has lots of "rocks" and "hams" as in Rockingham. Don’t forget Abraham Lincoln who kicks off every episode of Police Squad! In "The Butler Did It/A Bird in The Hand" a huge rock flies through the Burton’s window with a mime tied to it. The Burton’s and the police play charades with the mime to decipher the message. He tugs his ear for "sounds-like" and cups make-believe breasts for "bust." The word is "bus." That’s the code breaker for all of the buses and all names in the Fuhrman collection that sound like Cara (Sara Clara), Magli (Molly, Holly), Nicole (Nichols, Nicholas, Nick) and Fuhrman (Thurman Thurmond, Firmer, Foreman, Farman and Froman).

Throughout the murder investigation and the trial of O.J. Simpson the police, the prosecutors and the press repeatedly turned exculpatory evidence on its head to make O.J. appear to be guilty. That behavior follows a predictable pattern.

Once the best, brightest and most ambitious professionals invest their reputations in the guilt of a suspect, everything the suspect does is interpreted as an expression of guilt. O.J.’s ranting voice on Nicole’s ’93 911 tape (not the killer’s voice), the testimony of Allan Park and the angle at which he parked his Bronco are prime examples. Taken separately they all support his claim of innocence. Taken together, they prove it. Yet, all we hear from the people who should know better is the exact opposite. You see this all the time in the Fuhrman collection with men as women, perpetrates as victims, etc. The code breaker is in Any Which Way You Can with Tessa Richarde (Mary the boxer’s wife) as Sweet Sue flying a private Jet upside down to an illegal boxing match.

The last two code breakers have to do with Fuhrman’s obsession with black men and white women. Every white actress I know of who had a sexual onscreen or offscreen relationship with a black man appear in one or more movies with substantial ties to Nicole and O.J. The most pointed references involve German women like Nastassia Kinski who lived with Quincy Jones and gave birth to their daughter in ’93, or actresses playing German women like Madeline Kahn with Clevon Little in Blazing Saddles (’72). That character is the code breaker for Madeline Ashton in Death Becomes Her and Maddie Hays in Moonlighting. Much more about Moonlighting later. Now I want you to think about Mark Fuhrman’s bear hunting and Kinski as Suzy in The Hotel New Hampshire (’84). She dresses up like a bear. When a black man (Dorsey Wright) and white woman (Jodie Foster) get married she tells the bride’s brothers, "I bet your Frannie and Junior have beautiful kids."

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