Free Association

In the Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon game, the object is for a player to name a celebrity and for the rest of the players to see who can connect that person to actor Kevin Bacon with the least number of people between them.

For example: Geronimo... In the movie Tom Horn, Steve McQueen plays the title character, the historical figure responsible for capturing the Apache Chief Geronimo.  Steve McQueen appeared with Faye Dunaway in The Thomas Crown Affair. She appeared with Jack Nicolson in Chinatown. Jack Nicolson appeared with Kevin Bacon in A few Good Men. So, Geronimo is linked to Kevin bacon by Steve McQueen, Faye Dunaway and Jack Nicolson. If you could find a movie where Keven Bacon specifically mentioned Geronimo you could probably win that round of the game because there would be no one between Geronimo and Bacon.

Most people familiar with this game or the Milgram experiments that inspired it assume that The Smoking Gun connections between Fuhrman, the movies and the Bundy murders were made the same way. They weren’t. The game begins with the objective of finding a number of people to connect two people who don't seem to have anything to do with each other. There is no thematic criteria for making these connections and no rational way they are linked apart from what is necessary to string them together. Furthermore it is not possible to reach as many connection clusters that way as you see in The Smoking Gun books with two or less people between them and Fuhrman.

The only way you can get that many links in one coherent sequence after another is through the association process that links thoughts physically in human brain cells – things that are personal to individuals. They either exist or they don’t. Then it’s a question of learning what they mean, if anything, to anyone other than Fuhrman. You don't know in advance what you will get. Sometimes the results are surprising, like trains, the names Jennifer and Elizabeth, the cities of Detroit and New Orleans and something or someone with wings. They don't seem to mean anything to Fuhrman when the first two Smoking Gun books went online. They simply appeared with such disproportionate frequency or specificity with respect to other things in Fuhrman's public record that they had t be noted.

Other Fuhrman links get tighter because when you need London, New York, Boston, L.A., Chicago or Pittsburg to make the necessary connections those are the cities you get. If you need Smoky the Bear hats, delphiniums, Apollo or aviator jackets you get them.  If you need a bridge you get a bridge. If you need the Brooklyn Bridge you get the Brooklyn Bridge. If you need the Golden Gate Bridge you get it. If you need someone named Devries associated with the American Express gold card and gasoline (The Hidden) or someone named Cara associated with a leather glove, a black knit cap, a kitchen, a butcher knife, a phone, a hand written message and a pizza you get them, too (Calendar Girl Murders, Scissors, Basic Instinct -- all with Sharon Stone. You get all of them when and where they appear in something Mark Fuhrman said or did that is both unique and important to him.

Even if you went through ten "degrees of separation" with connections like these to Fuhrman along a single line of rational progression the random chance of getting that coherent progression of ides does not increase. It decreases. You cannot, therefore, add arbitrary links to the chain until you get a desired result because: A) you can't predict what the result will be and B) You could never get that far in charting the associations if Fuhrman didn't go to those places in his thinking. The verification of what you find is in what you discover next. If the themes you identified when you didn't know what they meant to Fuhrman appear in what you find later or something Fuhrman did later like producing his Murder in Greenwich movie or writing his Death and Justice and A Simple Act of Murder books,   

The way the Bundy murders are perceived through Mark Fuhrman’s words and deeds creates a free association map of where all of those things came from. If you study enough movies and TV shows and enough of what Fuhrman said about them, the actors and the characters you can see what Fuhrman saw. And you can see what he did. The fact that he used the same movie elements that the killer did in painting composite pictures of O.J.’s guilt by way of the clues he left behind and the way the bodies were displayed tells you that the same mind was at work. You can’t do this with O.J. You can’t do it with Vannatter, Lange or anyone else. You can do it only with Mark Fuhrman.

This is not speculation. The proof is in what Fuhrman did after The Smoking Gun: Mark Fuhrman’s Movie Guide to Assassination and The Smoking Gun 2: Mark Fuhrman’s TV Guide to Assassination went online. He produced a made-for-television movie saturated with movie and TV links I documented in the first two Smoking Gun books. He didn’t stop there. In his next book projects he confirmed more of what I found that he hadn’t said when I wrote my books about him.

This association technique also works in reverse. The next time you see a murder mystery released before June 12, 1994 that you hadn’t seen before, try to guess who the killer is just by things associated with Mark Fuhrman’s take on the killer in his first two books.  I’m talking about irrational criteria with respect to clues in the movie, like someone wearing leather gloves or an actor named Kennedy. The more you know about Fuhrman, the more likely you are to guess right.  –Jasper