A Practical Guide to Mind Reading

Works in progress can be good guides to the thinking process that goes into a finished piece. You can't know what a writer was thinking as his or her ideas were being formed if you don't know the steps and missteps that were taken to arrive at the finished work.  The missteps are the the most useful keys to the subconscious mind. Our subconscious knows everything we have ever seen, touched, heard, tasted, smelled, felt and thought. It's an awesome library of information. However, it can't think the way our conscious mind can. It accesses information and lends it out to the thinking mind only by a process of association, logical or otherwise. When you can see that something in the written or spoken word appears where it shouldn't, that something is missing or the grammar or syntax go to hell out of step with everything around it, you can often track exactly what happened in the writer's mind at those points.

The investigation of Det. Tom Nolan grows from the seed of Ron Phillips' consistent missteps whenever he referred to him. There had to be something about saying that guy's name on the witness stand that gave Phillips the jitters. A man like Phillips is not easily intimidated. How could a trainee detective who did nothing but tag along with Brad Roberts for a few hours have made their boss nervous?

In trying to answer that question you learn from Phillips that he wasn't Nolan's boss (who was?). Then you learn that Nolan was never in a position to see or hear anything that could have changed the way the prosecution or the defense approached the case (why wasn't he?). It goes downhill from there until you are forced to wonder if this person was really who Phillips said he was. Was he a real trainee detective on the O.J. case or someone acting the part? Every avenue of seeking a real Det Nolan leads to a phantom or a brick wall. Every avenue of seeking an imposter leads to an imposter -- including a professional imposter, an actor named Tom Nolan. You no longer get avenues of investigation. You get train tracks. When you hop aboard the train that runs on those tracks it takes you to more impostors with a gigantic self-portrait of Mark Fuhrman posted at every stop.

Fuhrman's public missteps on and off the witness stand are what you see with writers and artists developing and refining their work. Like a sculptor working in clay, a writer starts with a formless mass and an idea of what it should look like when it's finished. Basic components of the project have to be planned to give the piece a stable and coherent structure. But the best stuff comes from things that "just happen" as you proceed. When ideas pop into your head that "feel right" you go with them even if it means changing everything around them to make them fit. 

In the first stages of the writing process, errors can be extremely useful. They break up mind sets and allow you to see possibilities that you would not have seen if you hadn't made them.

For example: You see the name Charles Ward from The Resurrected in "Jack of Hearts." All of a sudden the name Dexter appears where Charles or Ward should be. Dexter? How did that get in there? In tracking it down you become conscious of what you already knew; Dexter is Charles Ward's middle name. You also see that inserting the  middle initial and dropping the letters before and after the last "e" in Charles gives you Edward. And Edward, the real first name of the man Mark Fuhrman call "Rob" in his Murder in Greenwich movie, is the name that matters.

This example comes from mistakes I made in writing the first two paragraph of Jack of Hearts.  I knew that something was wrong with my wording in both paragraphs but I couldn't see what it was until I found the "Dexter" error and figured out how I made it.  Then all of the elements that my subconscious was working with fell into place.  Another error I made was in writing that Charles Ward's evil ancestor took false whiskers and sunglasses out of a hat. He didn't. It was the detective who did that. And it was that discovery that led the detective to the correct solution that the evil ancestor eventually confessed to.

I also made the mistake of thinking that the cemetery in front of a farmhouse in The Resurrected was in the front yard. It was "just before you get to the house." All of these errors were helpful because when I spotted them, they pulled up important contextual information in my mind about Fuhrman's observations on Bundy, his farmhouse in Idaho and the dog's grave in O.J.'s front yard. All of these things were vital to what I wanted to get across in the article. My thinking mind didn't know it but my "unthinking mind" did. 

The site went down when I was trying to save the changes you see in Jack of Hearts. There are a couple of typos including a repetition of "at the station" where it doesn't belong. That was my subconscious telling me in its crude way to emphasize my first use of "at the station."

And so it is with Mark Fuhrman's mistakes. The difference is he doesn't erase them. He embellishes them or subdues them to make "better" stories and more compelling arguments than the facts will permit. He even makes "mistakes" on purpose (lies) to further his objectives. When you check the facts, you can therefore see what he did, why he did it and where the idea came from to do it. The idea to subdue the color of Claire Ward's dress, for example, in Rob Mathers' shirt and to use her hat (the headpiece on the Jack of Hearts playing card) as the subdued pattern in his shirt comes from a scene within the scene of Claire Ward talking about her husband. "Rob's" subdued shirt color. A similar pattern on "Rob Mathers'" shirt is on the Ward's rug.

This is Mark Fuhrman's Achilles' heel. It's where you tap into his thinking in his planning, his editing and in his adjustments to unexpected developments. When he told Dianne Sawyer about the fingerprint  in blood on the lock of Nicole's back gate, for instance, he said, "Oh, it was on gold -- excuse me -- brass, polished brass." He could have been thinking about Goldman at the front gate. But all things considered, He was probably thinking that he had been a military policeman who stood sentry duty at gates and that all civilian policemen are called officers. The Marine Corps colors are red (the color of blood) and gold (the color of brass). 

Fuhrman's "gold" slip" could mean that was thinking that brass is called gold in the ranking of military officers. Silver outranks gold because gold is only a reference to the color. As a detective he carried a gold badge but above the badge on his belt he wore a silver necktie.   He was probably thinking that in practical terms he outranked everyone as the first lead detective on the scene who set the course for the entire investigation. He  wasn't necessarily aware that he was thinking any of those things but all of the ingredients were present in what he told Dianne Sawyer about the fingerprint. They had to be present somewhere in his mind when he said it.

Errors are products of ignorance, overpowering associations, and broken concentration. You misspell a word because you don't know how to spell it correctly, because it reminded you at the time of a similar word or because something threw your thinking out of sync with your fingers. If you know football and you see a wide receiver drop an easy pass with the goal line four yards in front of him and no opposing player in sight, you know what he was thinking. He was thinking, "easy touchdown" before he got the ball. You know that it was such a powerful factor in his thinking at the wrong time that he did not pay enough attention to what he needed to do with the ball when he needed to do it to catch the damn thing. When a golfer leaves an easy put short of the hole you know that he was afraid of hitting the ball too hard. You have literally read his mind.

In the previous paragraph I initially typed "glover" when I meant to type "golfer." When I tracked down the source of the error I saw that I was still thinking about gold and silver. I was thinking about the actor Danny Glover and something other than a sports analogy I wanted to make. I was thinking specifically about his dialogue errors in the Lethal Weapon series and the leather gloves he wore in Silverado. The idea was unusable so I dumped it almost as soon as it entered my mind. It entered the page as an artifact of the discarded thought. The more you know about what goes into an error the easier it is to read the mind of the person who made it.

It is much easier to "read Fuhrman's mind" than most people's because he habitually uses a source that everyone has access to -- movies. When he wants you to see something the way he saw it in a movie he shows it to you that way. When he wants to hide his source he is no less difficult to read. He gives you a greatly exaggerated version of it, a greatly toned down version of it, a mirrored image or the exact opposite. This is Fuhrman's idea of mixing things up. He "invents" names, characters and situations that have already been invented and puts them together in "new" ways that aren't really new. You can "see" what he is saying in your brain if you saw it with your eyes in a movie.

With Fuhrman, movies always trump books. He did this in his own movie based on his own book. Unlike his "Brentwood" book, which was saturated with segments of movie and TV shows with the same actor, character, location, prop, costume or theme connectors between them, his "Greenwich" book had few of them. They clearly came from somewhere else. But the movie he produced based on his Greenwich book had saturation doses of them from beginning to end, including names in the beginning and end credits. 

I know of only four instances of Fuhrman deriving major source material from the written word. The first was Gordon Allport's The Nature of Prejudice. Second was Edith Hamilton's Mythology. Third was Thomas Kiernan's Jane Fonda. The bombshell was the Sutton report on the Martha Moxley murders, which reads amazing like Fuhrman's Murder in Greenwich movie, only with Fuhrman as the man who "solves" the case. Fuhrman actually uses errors in his movie that he didn't make in his book, based on the Sutton report.

How could Fuhrman have done this considering the fact that so much of his book was also based on the Sutton report? Studying the report and the movie will give you clues that you can get only from reading his mind.  --Jasper