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Behind the Scenes
For every paragraph and screenshot you put into a piece like Batman Villains or The Last of Sheila, you have to leave out something that you know is equally important. If you don’t, the abundance of information your readers have to absorb runs an increasingly higher risk of becoming too much to process and recall. The things that mean the most to some people are meaningless to others, so the hardest thing to do is to decide what to omit. Here, you will see some items that I didn’t put in Batman Villains or The Last of Sheila just because they filled those buckets to overflowing.
If I had included the following in Batman Villains or The Last of Sheila, I would have had to compress it by two thirds or more. Even that would have been too much. I thought I could do it here but once I got into it, I saw that I couldn’t.
Keys
On a Laura Hart McKinny audio tape
Mark Fuhrman said, “I’m the key witness in the biggest case of the century. And if I go down, they lose the
case. The glove is everything. Without the glove – bye, bye.” Here, he’s talking about the bloody Rockingham glove he said he found next to Kato’s bungalow wall.
“The Impractical Joker” is the first installment of a two part 1966 Batman story with Special Guest Villain Cesar Romero as The Joker. You see him first at the Keyborn Bookstore searching through a shelf of books until he finds the one he wants – Keys of the Kingdom. Laughing maniacally, he rips out the pages, scatters them about and runs away. His next stop is the Keynote Music Shop where he finds a record album called You’re the Key to my Heart. He shatters the vinyl record and moves on to the Gotham City Key Club where he finds the membership folder and burns it.
Cut to the interior of Bruce Wayne’s study inside the stately Wayne Manor...
Bruce is coincidentally fixed on keys as he asks his youthful ward Dick Grayson what the Rock of Gibraltar is famous for “other than its famous apes and the part it has always played in history.” Dick gives him the answer he was looking for. He says, “It’s the key to the Mediterranean.” Bruce tells him that he’s right and suggests that he make that the “keynote” of his Geography paper.
If you’re a “war and history buff” (like Mark Fuhrman) you’ll see the flaw in the way Bruce posed the question. The role that the Rock of Gibraltar has always played in history is because it’s the key to the Mediterranean. The castle and gold key on the Gibraltar coat of arms dates back to 1502
Meanwhile Police Chief O’Hara and Commissioner Gordon learn about the vandalism at the bookstore, the record shop and the Key Club. They are not alarmed until they discuss a prank where a key that sits on the Keystone Building has been turned around. It dawns on them that The Joker must be at work plotting some nefarious crime.
They summon the Caped Crusaders who arrive at the commissioner’s office at Police Head
The Joker is, of course, bating a trap. After putting the final touches on a hand-made key he inserts in into the hole of a black box and turns it. The box opens. It hums. Colored lights inside of it flash, and The Joker declares his latest invention a success. He calls it his “Magic Box.” By activating it with his key he puts his victims in a hypnotic trance, momentarily unaware of anything happening around them as though time, for them, has stopped. He made it specifically to use on Batman and Robin.
The Joker’s Magic Box works on the Dynamic Duo the first time when they confront him in the Jeweled Key of Kaincardine display room. They see the key in a gold frame hung on purple curtains. Then they see The Joker with the strange black object in his hand. The next thing they know, the key and The Joker are gone.
If you watch enough Batman shows you know that Robin is faster and better than his mentor at solving
Batman is also aided by his keen attention to detail, noting the emphasis on 3 Fs in the message. He knows that The Joker’s next target is Francine’s Fancy Fur Salon. He also knows that The Joker was once a hypnotist and concludes that his Magic Box is a hypnosis inducer. So, this time he and Robin confront The Joker prepared to resist its hypnotic effect.
You’ll never guess how they did it. In Robin’s defiant words when the magic box doesn’t work, “We took counter-hypnoses bat pellets from our bat capsule dispensary!”
The ensuing fisticuffs pit Batman and Robin against The Joker’s henchmen Latch and Bolt, plus two or three other generic thugs just to make the fight uneven. In the process, the Magic Box is broken and The Joker escapes with his female accomplice Cornelia.
To find The Joker’s hideout, Batman feeds the Gotham City Phone Directory into his bat-computer that he programmed to cross-reference names and metaphors that The Joker might use as a pseudonym. The name Clavier Ankh strikes a responsive cord because Batman knows that a clavier is the keyboard of an organ and an ankh is, “the sacred Egyptian cross symbolizing the key of life.”
They get the address of Clavier Ankh, as the Joker anticipated they would, and Cornelia leads them
You will also see that The Joker has improved on his Magic Box to turn it into a time machine. You might note that television can be described as a magic box. Furthermore, any device that allows you to see and hear a show that was made in 1966 can accurately be called a time machine. In this sense, any recording device is a time machine.
Time Travel
Building a time machine like The Joker’s is easier than you think unless you know what Mark Fuhrman and his LAPD partner Brad Roberts had in common with The Joker.
The prosecutors in O.J.’s murder trial used the testimony of limo driver Allan Park to make its case that Park saw O.J. sneaking into his front door after dropping the bloody glove on the south path of his house. Park said that he saw Kato Kaelin first on the north path. When you lay out the property to scale in an overhead view and put Kato and O.J. in motion with a working clock, you get an irreconcilable conflict. Fuhrman’s story fixes those problems but he shifts time by altering the sequence of events to do it.
Roberts shifted time with the notes he took and didn’t take in questioning Steven Schwab, the man who found the dog with the bloody paws on Bundy. Roberts pounded on Schwab’s door to get him out of bed at 5:00 a.m., showed him his LAPD ID and then told him that the dog was involved in a murder. Roberts noted that Schwab said he found the dog at 11:00 p.m. or 11:30. Roberts did not record Schwab’s attempt to get back to him when his head was clear enough to pinpoint the time at 10:50. The practical effect of Roberts’ notes, absent Schwab’s clear-headed reconstruction of events, was to give rhetorical time flexibility that real time doesn’t have.
The same verbal time shifting applies to Fuhrman’s story of O.J. driving in a reckless panic from Bundy to Rockingham and making the thumps on Kato’s south path bungalow wall that caused him to drop the glove. The fastest that anyone could have driven from Bundy to Rockingham was 4 ½ minutes by heading directly north from Dorothy nonstop at the highest possible speeds. The time problem there is dog walker Robert Heidstra’s observation of a light colored SUV driving south from Dorothy onto Bundy at 10:45 and the testimony of Kato and the woman he was talking to on the phone that the thumps occurred between 10:40 and 10:45.
Even allowing for five minute errors either way in the critical time estimates of Heidstra and Kato, time itself had to run forward and backward to get Fuhrman’s dropped glove scenario in the same story with his stick-by-the-Bronco scenario. The only way O.J. could have made the thumps was if he sped directly north from Bundy. The only way he could have somehow picked up the stick found next to the Bronco was to dive one block south, one block east, crash into a pile of discarded fencing, turn around and go back the way he came. He could not have done both of those things without a time machine.
Fuhrman and Roberts’ ability to shift time in the collective public mind is rooted in human frailties, the power of mass suggestion, catalytic agents and unexplained phenomena.
Human Frailties: Human beings have a horrible sense of time. We are bad at estimating when an event occurred and how long it lasted without contemporaneous reference to something that functions like a clock. It gets worse when we are alarmed and confused, as Steven Schwab was when Roberts rousted him out of bed by pounding on his door at 5:00 a.m. and told him up front that he was involved in a murder investigation. If Roberts wanted a bad answer from Schwab to an unexpected question about time, he couldn’t have picked a better way to get it.
Mass Suggestion: Inherent to any story is a coherent sequence of events – a timeline. The more a story is repeated in mass media the more likely it is to be accepted by a mass audience as true even if objective measures of time implicit in the story make it physically impossible. It doesn’t work on everybody on all occasions but it doesn’t have to. It just has to work on the reporters closest to the story at critical points in its development the way it did with early reports of “the police” finding a blood trail going into O.J.’s gate and a bloody ski mask in his closet. Mass suggestion spawns mass reaction and mass reaction in concert channels the subsequent flow of time.
Catalytic Agents: Evidence is inert until someone acts as a catalytic agent to call attention to it and says what it means. That’s what Fuhrman did with his “anything unusual” question to Kato that led him to the Rockingham glove. It’s what he did with his observations about the way the Bronco was parked. It’s what Fuhrman and Roberts did in describing a blood trail going into the Rockingham gate. They drew a mental picture of when O.J. last drove the Bronco on a Bundy-to-Rockingham timeline.
Unexplained Phenomena: Most of us don’t care about the science of matter in motion to calculate time. We care mostly about how it affects us – by our need to know when the Post Office closes, when the movie we want to see at the Bijou starts and how long it takes us to get there. What someone else is alleged to have done, depositing “damning evidence” of murder as he went, is therefore not a function of time as we normally think of it, nor is it a function of anything that requires science to explain. It’s a function of what we can imagine based on the information we need to imagine it. As far as unexplained phenomena are concerned, especially with time, “somehow” is good enough.
I can’t claim credit for that human frailty / mass suggestion / catalytic agents / unexplained phenomena breakdown of elements that went into the Fuhrman-Roberts time machine. I got it from “The Joker’s Provokers” episode of Batman.
In every scene with Cornelia, you see a mirror because her primary occupation is looking at a mirrored image of herself. When The Joker made his first Magic Box, she tore herself away from a mirror (a major effort) long enough to see why he was so excited about it. He didn’t say exactly what it was but when his red-vested henchman Latch, standing next to his blue-vested henchman Bolt, asked him what it was made of. He said, “Odds and ends, cheese parings, lighting bugs, cockle shells...”
After The Joker makes his Magic Box upgrade, he announces, “When I turn this key in my Magic Box I can turn time backward or forward or stop it completely.” He gives a demonstration of those effects on Gotham City traffic, a baseball player swinging a bat, a woman carrying a bag of groceries that breaks and other activities.
Cornelia is so impressed that she breaks free from the pull of a mirror to ask, “Did you make this one out of cheese parings and lighting bugs too, Joker?” He replies, “No Cornelia. My newest triumph is composed of more complicated parts; human frailties, the power of mass suggestion, catalytic agents, unexplained phenomena...”
In the December, 1966 episode of Batman called “The Puzzles are Coming,” Shakespearean actor Maurice Evans is The Puzzler. He made his first appearance on Bewitched in 1964 as Samantha’s father Maurice. His third appearance on Bewitched was in a September 29, 1966 episode called “Witches and Warlocks Are My Favorite Things,” In Planet of the Apes, he’s Dr. Zaius, an orangutan who holds the elite position of Minister of Science dedicated to debunking all claims of human intelligence comparable to the ape. Evans is Guy and Rosemary Woodhouse’s friend and former landlord Hutch in producer William Castle's Rosemary’s Baby (’68). In this one, he’s the fatal victim of a witch’s spell. His stolen glove was used to work the spell.
I didn’t know much about bell-ringers when I wrote the Fuhrman at the Moves chapter of Iago in
The only way O.J. Simpson could have dropped a glove on the south path of his estate is if he'd been holding it in his hand. Most Batman villains wear gloves. The Puzzler carries his. Look for them in his left hand in “The Puzzles are Coming.” Maurice Evans as Hutch in Rosemary's Baby is uniquely associated with a missing glove and an anagram. This is what you get when you play Scrabble with the producer credit shown immediately after “Special Guest Villain Maurice Evans as The Puzzler.” PRODUCED BY HOWIE HORWITZ. – HUTCH.
It wasn't Howie Horwitz or William Castle who made this connection. It was Mark Fuhrman. There would be no occasion to play this game without the glove missing from O.J.'s closet after Fuhrman and Roberts searched it and the word games imbedded in so many of Fuhrman's public projects.
As far as I was concerned, Maurice Evans was just an actor with an English accent and a great voice who appeared in lots of things I’d seen on TV. I knew his face, his voice and some of his characters but I never bothered to remember his name. There were lots of actors like that but his appearance in Batman changed everything.
In the first place, he is joined at the hip with Special Guest Villain Roddy McDowell in the original Planet of the Apes (’68). In that screenplay, co-written by Rod Serling, he’s Dr. Zaius. Roddy McDowell is Cornelius. Charlton Heston (Dark City) is a time-traveling astronaut. You will recall that Cornelia is The Joker’s accomplice in “The Joker’s Provokers,” the character who asked what his time machine was made of. Evans, as Dr. Zaius, is further entangled with “The Joker’s Provokers” by way of Bruce Wayne’s reference to the Rock of Gibraltar’s famous apes. Of all the actors who ever lived, only Maurice Evans and Roddy McDowell have that many connections to so many closely related things.
Some of Batman’s criminal adversaries quote lines from Shakespeare. None of them come close
A stolen handkerchief was Othello’s test of fidelity that Iago tricked him into giving Desdemona knowing that she would fail. Shakespeare’s Iago, Lady Macbeth and Richard III are “birds of self-same feather.” That’s a lot of well know Shakespeare packed into one obscure line and a handkerchief.
The Puzzler is on the penthouse balcony of billionaire Artemus Knab setting the first phase of his criminal plan into motion. He has a passkey for the penthouse. He says that he doesn't think Knab would mind because, "We are birds of the self-same feather."
The "Artemus Knab" answer to the puzzle that The Puzzler sends into Commissioner Gordon's office attached to a model airplane is actually a lour to reel Batman into a game of wits. The combination of those things amounts to an announcement of a criminal plot against Knab (bank spelled backward) and a signature of the criminal behind the plot. The Puzzler knows that Batman will get the right answer and make a fool of himself by jumping to the wrong conclusion about its meaning. Although it's an old trick used by The Riddler, The Joker, The Catwoman and The Penguin more than once, it works every time.
Batman and Robin take
the bate, breaking in on The Puzzler and Artemus Knab playing a game of Monopoly in Knab's p
In Fuhrman's movie he invented the name Morris Banks for the Skakel family tutor. Play Scrabble with "MORRIS BANKS THE SKAKEL TUTOR" and see what you get.
In the O.J. Simpson murder trial Mark Fuhrman’s “old friend” Ron Shipp said two things that should have made every student of Shakespeare
take notice. He claimed that O.J. privately confessed to him that he (O.J.) dreamed that he killed Nicole. That’s a variant of Iago giving second hand dream testimony to Othello about
Casio privately “confessing” his affair with Des
Look closely at the screenshot from “The Puzzles are Coming” of Bruce and Dick rushing to the bat poles (after lifting the head on Shakespeare’s bust to activate the sliding door bookcase). What do you see on your right of the frame? Yes... It’s a model ship. You see it in many episodes of Batman. We never learn what that ship meant to Batman or Robin but we know what a man named Shipp meant to O.J. Simpson, Nicole Brown Simpson and Mark Fuhrman.
— Jasper
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The short answer to how he
happened to be in all the right places at all the right times to ask Kato the key question that led him to it is the same as how he got his photo taken with the matching Bundy glove –
coincidence.
quarters to see his desk strewn with keys. The commissioner has coincidentally ordered
new keys for all of the doors at headquarters. They coincidentally arrived shortly before Batman and Robin did. Among them, coincidentally, is a literal skeleton key with a note on the
tag addressed to Batman. The note is a coded message that Batman decodes on the spot. It tells him that The Joker is planning to steal the priceless Jeweled Key of Kaincardine from a
visiting Scotsman’s fabulous collection of keys. So, off go Batman and Robin to foil the plot.
riddles. Batman’s boundless storehouse of facts and figures makes him better at deducing their
meaning and deciphering other forms of coded messages. It is, therefore, Batman who deciphers The Joker’s next coded message based on his detailed knowledge of every furry creature in the
animal kingdom. 
to a trap door. They fall in. The Joker sprays Robin with a thick coating of wax and locks
Batman in a human key duplicator. You have to tune into the next exciting episode called “The Joker’s Provokers” to see how they escape.
Brentwood. The very concept was little more than a vague notion. But I’d
gone far enough down that road to recognize Fuhrman’s MF initials and the glove missing from O.J.’s closet after Fuhrman and Roberts searched it as 
to Maurice Evans as The Puzzler in “
enthouse apartment. You see the game in progress before the Dynamic Duo appear with Knab being interrupted by phone calls about a movie he's producing and a 200 foot diesel yacht he wants
to buy. You learn after the Batman-Robin break-in that Knab and The Puzzler are legitimate business partners, with The Puzzler acting as Knab's publicist in a balloon advertising campaign.
These things might remind you of Clinton Green in The Last of Sheila and Dyan Canon, who shares Mark Fuhrman's birthplace, playing the publicist/informer on the yacht.
demona.
Shipp also gave a nod to Lady Macbeth when he said that he was testifying against his friend O.J. because he didn’t want Nicole’s blood on his hands.
