The watch is photographed with the hour hand near the 2 and the minute hand nearest the 10 to draw attention to the Swiss Army name and logo between them. The 22 in the calendar box is also a standardized photographic element.  22 is a photographic convention for the date. But 22 is Mark Fuhrman bell ringer. If you read the military hour closest to the minute hand you'd also get 22.

Read as a date,  2 10 is the birthday of Ralph Fuhrman, Mark Fuhrman's father.  Mark Fuhrman and his boss Ron Phillips signed into the Bundy murder scene at 2:10. In reading time normally, 2:14 is four minutes after 2:10. In turning hours into months and days, 2 is still 2 for the second of 12 months. However, there is no 28 to 31-minute division of days per month on a watch unless you figure it the way you figure the hours in a day after 12 o'clock noon in military time. The simplest solution is to continue the count past noon to 13:00. Twice around  is 24. To signify a calendar day past 24, you begin the third time around with 25 and keep going until you get it.  2:10, 2:14 and 2:26 can all be represented by the same "civilian time" because only the position of the hand that lines up exactly on the hour counts. 214 is the first set of digits in Mark Fuhrman's 21464 badge number.

You can do a lot with 2:10 on a 24-hour analogue watch.

Read as numbers on the face rather than time gives you 2 and 22. The 222 number would get you the address of the Brown home in Dana Point and a TV series Room 222 (check the biographies of the top billed stars). The time presented on the face of the watch just tells you were to look for the numbers to use as a calendar date if the given time doesn't match a relevant date. The only way to read all of them correctly is to know which times read as dates are relevant to Mark Fuhrman.

Swiss Army Cavalry

This June, 1994 Vanity Fair ad is the last picture of a watch like Nicole's watch that a Vanity Fair reader would have seen before she was killed on June 12. The stem position on this "Cavalry" watch is aligned with the calendar box, which is always set on 22 in Swiss Army watch ads.

Watch Code

You can read the watch as a calendar for all 12 months of the year with the first 12 hours of the day, from 1 (for January) to 12 o'clock noon (for December). You read days in consecutive order going past 12 to 13 the first time around and past 24 to 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30 and 31 the second time around to cover every day in any month. The numbers next to 1 (13), 2 (14), 3 (15), 4 (16), 5 (17), 6 (18) and 7 (19) are the ones you read.  Every model of the Swiss Army watch can be used to create the same code. It's all about reading hours and minutes like 10:03 only as visible hour positions (1 through 12) on the ring of the watch face (10 + 3)

The only code necessary to link Mark Fuhrman directly to the Cavalry is Tim Holt's Cavalry officer character in John Ford's Stagecoach. Tim Holt's birthday is the same as Fuhrman's, February 5.

Swiss Army Original Watch

Field and Stream ad 1990           Mark Fuhrman article in Vanity Fair 1997             E-bay auction item 2012

Special Codes

The 24-hour Swiss Army watch code grows from the "flexible" way that Mark Fuhrman wrote the first three digits of his badge number on his Bundy notes and a Twilight Zone episode called, To Serve Man.

Nicole Simpson's watch functions like a decoder book. It was stopped at 10:03. There is no # 3 on her watch. It would not be read as a code in minutes anyway. It would be read as March, the 3rd Month. 3 is the calendar position that turns hours into months. The numbers in the box go from 1 to 31 for every day in any month. The advertising default display is 22. Birthdays, death days and other significant dates can be used to pull up maps (like the January 17, 1993 Northridge earthquake). All 60 minutes have a corresponding hour number from 1 to 12. It is only a matter of going around the face enough times to see what each one is. 2:10, for example, is only one way to get 214 from a February date. February 26 (2:26) can also be read 214.

Murder in Greenwich: 12-hour watch with the minute hand in the calendar (3) position and a calendar with 24 visible days

 

The pilot episode of Moonlighting sets up a single hand on an airplane pilot's wristwatch in the first shot of the first scene. The watch is not what it appears to be. It is a code to locate a place on a map, the corner of Broadway and 9th and a clock on the side of a tall building. The minute hand points to the 9 position on the clock face where a fortune in Nazi diamonds are hidden. On the Swiss Army watch the hour hand is key. The Swiss Army minute hand means nothing unless both hands line up like one.

 

–Jasper