Go to
Chapter 14

Table of Contents

The Bundy murder case has all the basic ingredients of a 1984 to 1994 erotic thriller. It has a love triangle, obsession, duplicity, suspense and murder. An erotic thriller of this era usually involves a young woman cheating on her older husband with a man her own age and the younger man so obsessed with the woman that he is willing to kill or die for her. She always radiates sex. She always performs oral sex. She frequently has an estranged husband or boyfriend who spies on her (Night Eyes) or stalks her (Night eyes 3) or plots to kill her (Night Eyes II). She often claims to live in fear (Body Heat). The younger man always comes to her rescue and somebody always ends up dead.

The first three Night Eyes movies (’90, ’92 and ’93) have so much in common with the image of O.J. as a killer and Nicole as his victim that someone couldn’t resist casting O.J.’s girlfriend Paula Barbiari for a starring role in Night Eyes 4 (’95). In the first scene of Night Eyes 4, a man in a dark blue knit cap and leather gloves attacks her with a knife. A handsome young hero rushes to her rescue and saves the day. We know that didn’t happen on Bundy, but you can see where the idea came from.

The first rule of an erotic thriller in the Fuhrman movie collection is that you can’t believe what you see and hear. That’s one reason I can’t include Fatal Attraction in this special category of films. What you see there is pretty much what you get. Steamy sex, taught suspense and shocking violence aren’t enough. However, the mid ’80s to mid ’90s erotic thriller often borrows freely from film-noir and movies in other genres with closely related themes. In the Heat of Passion’s toilet stall scene, for example, with Sally Kirkland as Lee could easily have come from the same script as a similar scene with Helen Mirren as Georgina in The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover (’89).

Both scenes are set in the women’s lavatory of a fine restaurant where Georgina and Lee were sitting with their husbands and their husbands’ friends before they joined their lovers. As they look at the man they are about to have sex with both women eat asparagus. In The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover, Alan Howard is Georgina’s lover Michael. As Georgina finishes off her spear of asparagus, with her eyes and her mind on Michael, her husband Albert orders one of his stooges to fetch the French chief. The stooge’s name is Cory. Does that remind you that In the Heat of Passion features Nick Corri as Lee’s stooge? Sally Kirkland was 48 when she played Lee. When Helen Mirren played Georgina she was 44.

In case you’ve forgotten what Helen Mirren has to do with Mark Fuhrman, let me remind you. She is Jane Tennison, the high-ranking female police officer in the British television movie Prime Suspect (’90), who is very much like Judge Ito’s wife Margaret York and the female lead in Fuhrman and Hart’s screenplay. The toilet stall scene in The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover should remind you of what Fuhrman told Laura Hart that York did to advance in her career. It should remind you of the ten-letter c-word Fuhrman used to kick-start Laura Hart’s tape library of their conversations to develop their screenplay.

These name and place associations feed on each other the way creative ideas feed on each other in a hot and heavy brainstorming session. Knowing that Mirren’s father was a Russian aristocrat might remind one brainstormer of Russian Empress Catherine the Great’s greatest claim to fame. It might remind someone else of Kathryn Leigh Scott as Marla Cordonte, a judge that Georgia attorney Ben Matlock catches at a restaurant table with a reputed thief in "The Talk Show" episode of Matlock (’89).

Dan Galloway, the host of "The Talk Show," invites syndicated columnist Catherine Randolph, Judge Marla Cordonte and his former co-host Leanne (Lee) Wilson on his show. He gets them there under false pretenses and ambushes all three of them with loaded question? He uses guilt by association to imply that the judge used sex to advance her career. That accusation will remind some people of what Fuhrman said about Judge Ito’s wife, LAPD Capt. Margaret York who suspended him for twenty-two days over the racist incident involving Martin Luther King’s birthday. Others will flash on Kathryn Leigh Scott as Sally Dekker in the pilot episode of Police Squad!

The name Sally might bring to your mind images of Sally Kirkland as Lee, the older woman who was having the affair with a much younger man in In the Heat of Passion and a murder victim in JFK. That could bounce you back to Nicole Simpson who was ten years older than Ron Goldman or Margaret York who was ten years older than her husband Judge Lance Ito. Now that we’re talking again about a judge and a woman named Lee, it’s easy to picture Kathryn Leigh Scott once again in "The Talk Show" episode of Matlock as Judge Marla Cordonte. When one of Galloway’s guests buries a hatchet in his neck, he leaves a dying clue by setting the counter on the tape machine and pulling the plug. The picture stops on a shot of the judge, but the real clue to the killer’s identity is the counter that says 337. From Galloway’s perspective when he pulled the plug, it spelled LEE.

You get a feel for the kind of show that Dan Galloway likes to do in the opening credits of "The Talk Show." You see him with a microphone and his last name in glittering green Styrofoam over his head. As the credits fade in and out on the screen, he gives three promotional announcements, each followed by the phrase, "Tomorrow on Galloway." In the first promo he announces, "Women who make love on airplanes." The second promo is "Married women and their lesbian lovers." The third is "Men who can’t get enough."

Viewed through the eyes of obsession with Dan Blue and the cheerleader he dated at Scott Fuhrman’s high school in Eatonville WA, Dan plus sex could equal visions of the Eatonville football team and its cheerleaders. You may then flash on Clark Kent’s girlfriend Lana Lang as a teenager in Superman (’78) and one thing Smallville High’s football team had that Eatonville’s didn’t – a black cheerleader.

Clark plus sex, could remind you of Chevy Chase and Beverly D’Angilo as Clark and Ellen Griswold in National Lampoon’s Vacation (’83). The scene that opened in my mind was the one where Clark reminds Ellen of a "fond memory" he wanted to relive in the front seat of his car while their children were asleep in the back. Ellen tells Clark to wait until they get to the motel. He offers to let her rest her head in his lap – no funnybusiness. She reluctantly agrees. He lifts the steering wheel. She lays her head in his lap. The wheel comes down and gets stuck. Ellen doesn’t believe it’s an accident. She calls him a degenerate and raises enough fuss to get the attention of the kids. You can tell by their faces what it looks like to them just as you could tell by Leslie Nielsen’s face in Airplane! what it looked like Elaine was doing to the automatic pilot.

While most of your brain cells that are dedicated to the task at hand may be showing you pictures of Julie Hagerty as Elaine in Airplane! with her head in the automatic pilot’s lap, a few of those cells may not have unlinked yet from Clark and Clark in Superman and Vacation. There’s a good reason for that. It has to do with Clark Kent’s first night on the job as the man of steel flying to the rescue of the President aboard Air Force One which has been hit by lightning. (Bill Clinton played golf with "the Juice" shortly before the murders. Keep in mind that he was also a saxophone player). The plane is losing altitude rapidly when, Superman, in his blue tights flies under a wing to take the place of a missing engine.

What flying man in a tight-fitting blue outfit with yellow trim do you see when you combine Dan Steven Galloway’s promos, "Women who make love on airplanes" with "Men who can’t get enough?"

If you have ever seen Airplane! how can you not see the automatic pilot with the ultra-slim Julie Hagerty "blowing him" up? Tanya Roberts is Julie Rogers in Charlie’s Angels. Going from a man named Dan (Blue) and Steve (Bogart in To have and Have Not) to a "slim" woman putting her lips around a tube and blowing, how can you not see ultra-slim Lauren Bacall as Marie Browning (a.k.a. Slim) calling Bogie "Steve" and telling him how to whistle? How can you not see Hagerty in the captain’s seat next to the automatic pilot enjoying a cigarette with him when the blow-up job is done? O.J. didn’t smoke but Nicole did.

If you envisioned Cheryl Ladd just then as Louise Baltimore the chain-smoking time traveler posing as a stewardess on doomed airplanes in Millennium (’89) or as one of Charlie’s Angels, it wasn’t because you willed the image into your head. Ladd is Kris Monroe in Charlie’s Angels. Kris Kristofferson is Bill, her love interest in Millennium and Christopher Reeve is the flying man in the blue tights in Superman. The only way you could avoid making connections like these automatically is if you hadn’t seen the movies or TV shows and didn’t know the names of their characters.

Listening to Galloway’s promos, how can you not see Mrs. Callister in Sins of Desire as a surrogate Hilary Clinton making love to her husband and to Charlie’s Angel Tanya Roberts as Kay or Julie? Although Nicole and O.J. were divorced when Nicole and Faye Resnick had their affair, chances are you thought of them, too. And how can you think of Nicole in this context without thinking of O.J.'s numerous sexual escapades? O.J. once boasted of have sex with one of Charlie's Angels. He didn't say which one.

Powerful leaders like Bill Clinton as well as great sports figures like O.J., Jim Brown and Magic Johnson, all # 32, were notorious for their sexual promiscuity. When Johnson was diagnosed with AIDS, Nicole feared that the same fate could befall her. Nicole had a strong sex drive of her own. She told friends that her most compatible sex partner was O.J. before and after their divorce. So, not only did she have a good reason to be concerned, she had no choice in whether or not to think about it.

An ongoing problem I have with involuntary associations here is with names and numbers related to history altering (time travel) physical assassinations and the image assassination of O.J. Simpson. Most of the numbers are birthdays and death days; 5 and 12 (February and June), 15 (January and April), 26 (July), and 22 and 23 (November). The names are Mary, Lincoln, John, Lee, Martin, James, and Brown. Martin Luther King died of an assassin's bullet on the day and month of 4/4. Lincoln died of a an assassin's .44 bullet. JFK was assassinated on 11/22.

Officer Mark Fuhrman, his boss Lt. Margaret York, and Dr. Martin Luther King are names and titles that always add up to a birthday, a death day, a "blowup" a "blowjob" and a twenty-two day suspension. Twenty-Two equals the change on Nicole’s driveway – until it magically turned into eleven cents. "Twenty Two" also equals The Twilight Zone episode with Barbara Nichols as the hospital patient Elizabeth Powell and Arlene Sax as the phantom morgue nurse on the elevator and the stewardess on the doomed flight.

If you know the story behind "Twenty Two" you know the Dr. Souse connection. A doctor link to an airplane in distress is a Leslie Nielsen link to Airplane! and the stewardess blowing up the automatic pilot. "Twenty Two" also gives you a "sax" link. It becomes a Bill Clinton link and a particular kind of sex link when you see Buddy the boxer in Police Squad trying to play "Happy Birthday" on a saxophone and Nielsen as Frank Drebin taking the instrument away from him with the admonition, "No sax before a fight."

This is the title fight that a crooked promoter named Martin is trying to get Buddy to throw by kidnapping his blonde wife Mary (Goldie and the Boxer). The homosexual FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover secretly recorded Martin Luther King having sex with white women. Last but not least, the saxophone-playing boxer gives us a link to the saxophone playing boxer in Here Comes Mr. Jordan (’41) and a whole new meaning to that title.

All of these associations are what you get whether you want them or not once you know Fuhrman’s history and the ways in which they are related to him and Judge Ito’s wife, Margaret York who eventually became a captain. This is a problem that anyone trying to walk around in Fuhrman head would have with trying to take a related thought in a different direction. The more you know, the harder it gets. You have a similar problem with Stella Stevens, Kathryn Leigh Scott, Tessa Richarde and Bonnie Britton in the role of Lana Cassales. Wherever you see one of them, it takes a special effort not to see one or more of the others.

The only direct link between Leslie Nielsen and Stella Stevens is at the captain’s dinner table in The Poseidon Adventure. That is enough to link them to Scott in the pilot episode of Police Squad! in which he introduced himself to her character Sally Dekker as "Captain Drebin."

At the end of all six Police Squad! episodes, Drebin tells Capt. Hoken that the criminal they captured will have to do whatever he or she does "in Statesville Prison." In the second episode where Tessa Richarde plays Buddy’s wife Mary, Drebin adds Martin, the man who kidnapped Mary and tried to fix Buddy’s fight, to the list of people in Statesville Prison "along with Sally Dekker." Lana Cassales, the woman in men’s shoes who blew up the judge in the fourth episode of the series, is thereby linked to Sally Dekker’s name three times.

The fourth episode of Police Squad! is where Lana’s name is also linked to K.T. O’Sullivan as her rival Mimi de Jour (celebrity reporter Kathleen Sullivan used to baby-sit for O.J.). You’ll remember Mimi as the redhead with the "Is this some kind of bust?" line when Frank and Ed drop by to question her about Lana’s husband Eddie. When the Police Squad detectives give the redhead permission to change, she goes behind a partition and comes back out as a blonde. Seeing her as a blonde in her yellow outfit might remind you of Tessa Richarde in Bronco Billy. Seeing her as a blonde named Coffee in a yellow outfit and "some kind of bust" might remind you of Stella Stevens from Hot Coffee, Mississippi as Jim Brown’s leading lady in Slaughter.

For no reason I could think of at the time, I kept picturing young redheads like Lana Lang when I was trying to write about a 48-year-old blonde named Lee. I kept picturing Leslie Nielsen as the doctor in Airplane! morphing into Frank Drebin on a park bench with Kathryn Lee Scott yanking off her blonde Sally Dekker wig to expose her as a redheaded gunrunner from Memphis (where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in 1968). It took so little to send me off on a redhead tangent that I should have known by that fact alone how relevant it was to what I was trying to do. You can’t force your subconscious mind to stop on a dime once it has been set in motion.

I knew, somehow, that the reason I kept seeing redheads in my mind had to do with something more than Sally Dekker and Mimi de Jour’s red wig. I knew that it involved Frank Drebin luring Sally Dekker to a phony meeting with her orthodontist and her waiting in front of a military hat shop and looking at her watch. Drebin’s subsequent appearance with a line about doctor’s keeping you waiting took me straight to the cockpit of Airplane! where the doctor walked in too late to see what the stewardess was really doing with her head in the automatic pilot’s lap. But Sally’s wristwatch, her problem with the time, her red suit, her white gloves and the three wigs she wore under the blonde one eventually took me to Cheryl Ladd as Louse Baltimore and her wig-wearing fellow time travelers posing as 1963 flight attendants in Millennium.

The suit and gloves explained a lot, but not everything. They did not explain my feeling that I was missing something. I knew that it had to do with my birthday, July 26, 1946 and the importance of July and February birthdays in the Fuhrman collection. I knew that O.J.’s birthday was July 9 and that Mark Fuhrman and Jennifer Jason Leigh were born on February 5. I knew that part of the answer was in The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre with Jason Robards Jr. because February 14 is the birthday of Jennifer Jason Leigh’s dad Vic Morrow. Leigh’s birthday (her given name is Jennifer Lee) is the same as Fuhrman’s. Jason Robards Jr.’s, the friend of the Morrow family that Leigh took her middle name from, is the same as Helen Mirren's and mine. But what did any of this have to do with a redhead?

The answer was not Lee’s role in Single White Female. It was in a 1946 movie I saw a long time ago called The Dark Corner starring Lucille Ball in a dramatic role with Mark Stevens. Stevens is a private eye (like Ralph Meeker as Mike Hammer) named Brad. You may have seen him in Fate is the Hunter (’62) as Mickey Doolan. He is the copilot of a military airplane piloted by Rod Taylor ("George," the time traveler in The Time Machine) that he thinks is going to crash. In The Dark Corner, Lucile Ball is Brad’s loyal secretary Kathleen.

Clifton Webb is a wealthy, controlling older man obsessed with the young and beautiful Cathy Downs as his cheating wife Mari (Mary). He has her lover killed in a way that frames Brad and he kills the killer himself. Mari’s lover is Kurt Kreuger as Tony Jardine. In The St. Valentines Day Massacre, Kreuger is James Clark (Clark’s birthday is February 25), a murderer for George "Bugs" Moran and a murder victim of Al Capone. Ralph Meeker is George Moran. Jason Robards Jr. is Capone. Kreuger’s birthday is July 23. That's a combination of the month Lincoln assassination conspirators George Atzerodt, Mary Surratt, David Harold and Lewis Powell were hanged and the day after JFK was killed. Fuhrman made his claim to fame the day after Ron and Nicole were killed. Kreuger was born in Germany.

Let’s look at Kurt Kreuger through the eyes of an admiring young nazi and a mature collector of Nazi war paraphernalia named Mark Fuhrman. Kreuger plays the Nazi ("superman") in Sahara (’42) who calls the Sudanese soldier a "nigger." When Fuhrman said he was "playacting" on the Laura Hart McKinny tapes, nigger was one of his favorite words.

The Nazi Youth Flag you see in Chapter 12 of the first Smoking Gun – the one with the 33 over the eagle – might be ringing some chimes right about here. 33 was Larry Bird’s number. Bird = wings, angels, and carriers of newly departed souls. Bird was number three on Fuhrman’s top three list of athletes. If you noticed how close Jardine is to Jordan it is only natural that you would recall Fuhrman naming Michael Jordan, the basketball player who looked like he could fly, as his second favorite athlete. Jordan’s number was 23 – the same as "Jardine’s" birthday. But don’t discount Fuhrman’s number one athlete and the boxer in Here Comes Mr. Jordan. Was Fuhrman just talking about athletes?

Fuhrman said that his number one athlete of all time was heavyweight boxer George Foreman. In Here Comes Mr. Jordan, Robert Montgomery (the father of TV star Elizabeth Montgomery, Samantha the witch in Bewitched and Lizzie Borden in the Legend of Lizzie Borden) is the boxer Joe Pendleton. Joe is also a pilot whose airplane is about to crash when an angel-like being steps in and takes his soul. Remind you of Cheryl Ladd in Millennium? Leading man George Montgomery (no relation) was a real heavyweight boxer before he became a big movie star. In Sahara, Kurt Kreuger is the pilot who has to bail out of his Nazi war bird when tank commander Humphrey Bogart shoots it down.

Perhaps the red uniforms of the time travelers posing as flight attendants in Millennium reminded you of the red suit Kathryn Leigh Scott wears as Sally Dekker in the pilot episode of Police Squad! Maybe the red suit plus the fact that Drebin tricks her into appearing with him, then ambushes her with loaded accusations reminded you of what Dan Galloway on Matlock does to Kathryn Leigh Scott as Judge Marla Cordonte or to Leann Henley as Lee, the woman in red. The topper for me, once I saw the possibility of a connection between Galloway, Scott, Ladd and Krueger was the revelation by Samantha Egger as Catherine Randolph, the fashion critic and syndicated columnist. She said that he made a parachute jump in the nude for a publicity stunt.

Getting the media’s attention is easy if you’re willing to do something outrageous enough. All you have to know is the formula for the kind of attention you want and tailor your stunt accordingly. The assassination of any famous person or his or her image in the 1990s was a guaranteed winner if it was carried out and followed up on with CNN, NPR and popular network talk shows in mind. It’s like bombing a symbolically important building. The trick is not to be on ground zero when the building explodes but to be close enough to the bodies in the rubble that any prize-winning report on the story will have to include you.

If you read Iago in Brentwood, you know that I think the framing of O.J. Simpson for the ambush murders on Bundy was the most outrageous publicity stunt of all time. Once Mark Fuhrman got in the limelight he went to work showcasing his talents as a talk show personality for the kind of show Galloway lured Judge Marla Cordonte and Leann Wilson onto his show with, by promising both of them the same job.

At last report, Mark Fuhrman was a radio talk show host in Washington State. ABC tried to hire him as an expert commentator. If the murder of Ron Goldman and Nicole Simpson were a publicity stunt to showcase Fuhrman’s talents as a talk show host as well as a great detective and a writer, who got his ideas from Hollywood, shouldn’t we expect to see more? Shouldn’t there be a concrete link between Leanne Wilson, Mark Fuhrman and the Bundy murders?

Remember Fuhrman’s involvement in the Monica Lewinsky case with his recommendation about the DNA? Remember his statement on tape about Margaret York "fucking and sucking" her way to the top? Consider this: Leann Hunley (born February 25, 1955 in Fuhrman’s home State of Washington.) who plays Lee on "The Talk Show" is DANA in the 1990 episode of Murder, She Wrote called "Murder – According to Maggie." The first thing she says to DIANA Canova as Mary Margaret McCauley is, "Who do I have to sleep with to get off of this show?" The uncensored version of that line is "Who do I have to blow…?" In defending his use of words like "nigger" and "cocksucker" Fuhrman said that this is the kind of language a character like Andy Sipowicz "in the 1990s" on NYPD Blue or Homicide would have used if those shows had been on cable. We are therefore safe in interpreting Dana’s "Who do I have to sleep with…" as "Who do I have to blow…"

We’re not finished with "Murder – According to Maggie." But we have to put that examination on hold until we do some cleanup work on Leann Hunley’s character Leann Wilson (Lee) in "The Talk Show" episode of Matlock (’90) and Sally Kirkland as Lee in In the Heat of Passion (’93)

Matlock is an exceptionally well thought out television series. That’s why an occasional blunder stands out like a bloody fingerprint on the brass lock of a gate at a bloody crime scene (Fuhrman’s Bundy crime scene note # 15). First of all, you’d expect to see lots of blood where the sharp edge of a hatchet makes violent contact with the side of "The Talk Show" host’s neck. The man, presumably, bled to death and an innocent woman’s fingerprints were found on the murder weapon. Yet, no blood is on or around the fallen body, on the shoes or stockings of the killer or on the murder weapon. Lee, the killer, leaves no bloody shoeprints on the carpet as she walks away in her high heel shoes.

The killer does leave a brass button on the carpet that fell from her red coat. Michelle and Ben figure out right away that the real killer was wearing gloves to preserve the fingerprints on the hatchet of the woman being framed. Nevertheless, you see them handling the brass button with their bare fingers with no thought of checking it for its owner’s fingerprints. Only through a convoluted series of observations and clever maneuvers, like getting Lee to wear the red suit then spilling coffee on it, does Matlock connect Lee to the brass button and thereby to the red jacket and the murder and to the framing of his client. Like the blood missing from Murphy’s shoe in RoboCop, these oversights were corrected in the framing of O.J. Simpson with the bloody shoeprints (Nicole’s brand) the blood on the socks (O.J.’s socks were made of a sheer material) and the fingerprint on "brass."

To leave behind convincing evidence of O.J.’s guilt in the form of rare leather gloves the killer had to have worn them over thin latex gloves just as they were worn in court. The Fuhrman collection features lots of villains in rubber gloves, some latex and some not. In the Heat of Passion begins with a reenactment of a rape. It is the latest in a series of attacks perpetrated by a young man called the Montclair Hills Rapist who lays in wait for his victim and carries out the rape with a knife to her throat.

Charlie Bronson is the young mechanic seduced by Lee and tricked into an elaborate scheme to protect her son Leslie, the real Montclair Hills Rapist, and to get rid of her husband who molested him as a child. Like so many key people in Fuhrman’s role in the Bundy murder investigation to enhance his status as marketable writer and talk show personality, Lee’s meeting with Charlie appears to be accidental. He was actually carefully selected by her for his close resemblance to her son (thus, the mother/son incest link between In the Heat of Passion and Night Eyes 3).

As a professional psychologist Dr. Lee Francis Adams is able to play Charlie like a one man band, orchestrating the young man’s movements toward a death struggle with her husband Sanford. It doesn’t matter to Lee who wins since she can kill Sanford if he wins and set up Charlie as Sanford’s murderer if Charlie kills him.

This is one of those movies I am 100 % certain the Bundy killer watched because of oddball things that no one could predict if certain features of the real murders weren’t taken from the movies and Fuhrman’s advice on Presidential DNA. If you don’t already know what I mean, you’ll see it in the next chapter. It has something to do with "Murder – According to Maggie" and Charlie Bronson. I wanted to put it in this chapter, but I couldn’t squeeze it all in.

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