Chapter 13

 

Every movie link in The Smoking Gun books springs from the premise that Mark Fuhrman killed Ron Goldman and Nicole Simpson, that he framed O.J. for fame, money and power, and got his ideas from movies.  

For all of those things to be true the rules that govern what constitutes a relevant movie link to Fuhrman have to be strict, exclusive and well defined. You can’t make up rules as you go along to fit the theory. You have to find rules that test it. You have to take what you think you know and see if what you discover afterwards fills the gaps or kills the theory.  

Any theory is what the theorist imagines to be true. It’s speculation and extrapolation, two intellectual exercises that often lead to verisimilitudes rather than truth. A verisimilitude is an appearance of truth, an illusion, a believable misrepresentation of reality. An illusion presented as magic is a verisimilitude. Believable fiction presented as a true story in any form like a diary or a documentary is a verisimilitude. Therefore a valid theory can’t be pure speculation. It has to be based on evidence and the evidence has to connect in a predictable way.  

Murder in Greenwich is packed with verisimilitudes. You are told in the trailer that it’s based on “the shocking true story of the murder of Martha Moxley and the man determined to find her killer… ‘Hi, I’m Mark Fuhrman.’” But the movie makes significant departures from Fuhrman’s book and from transcripts of the accused killer’s murder trial.  

According to my theory, I expected to see a deck of cards, a six of clubs, a queen of diamonds and a one-eyed jack somewhere in Murder in Greenwich. I based this expectation mostly on Twin Peaks, Eyes of Laura Mars, One-Eyed Jacks and The Manchurian Candidate. The six of clubs was a given as the weapon that killed Martha Moxley. The jack of spades and the jack of hearts are called one-eyed jacks because they are drawn in profile so you can see only one eye. The older Rob Mathers has short dark hair. The 22-year-old Rob Mathers playing cards with his mother has long, straight, blonde hair like Clair Ward in The Resurrected. His hair is curled up on the ends like the jack of hearts in Twin Peaks. As the camera pans to his mother, he faces to his right like the jack of hearts in Twin Peaks.

The test of my one-eyed jack sub-theory was how the evidence in Murder in Greenwich matched it and how it connected to the evidence I collected on Fuhrman that inspired the overall theory.  

Suppose you are looking for a mechanic to fix your British sports car. A friend recommends Joe Park on the corner of Front Street and BS Blvd. He tells you that Park is a great mechanic but you might have trouble with his foreign accent. You go to the intersection and see a garage with a sign above the door that says Joe Park, Auto Mechanic. A black man in coveralls with a Joe Park nametag tells you in a heavy Cockney accent that he knows the problem and that your car will be ready in two days. You walk out with the theory that you dealt with Joe Park. Based on the evidence you have you predict that he will fix your car in two days.   

Several things could happen when you go back to the garage: The man you spoke with could return your car fully repaired. He could tell you to come back in two weeks. He could “fix” something that wasn’t broken and leave you with the same problem and a big bill. An Asian guy with a Joe Park nametag on his coveralls could tell you in a Korean accent that he is Joe Park. He could say he was on vacation when you brought your car in, the shop was closed and he knows nothing about your car.  

The point is this; evidence leading you to believe something is true might take you anywhere. You can guess where you are going to end up by following it but you won’t know until you get there or until you end up somewhere else. The first order of business in formulating rules to test a theory is therefore to minimize the possibility that the evidence you use and the way you use it can take you anywhere other than to the truth.  

As Fuhrman points out in Murder in Brentwood, you then have to go wherever the evidence takes you. He wrote it but he didn’t do it. The recurring pizza theme in movies I linked to him eventually led me to a tombstone in Back to the Future III. The recurring one-eye them led me to a courtroom in Sergeant Rutledge and to Bert Lancaster in Castle Keep. In each case the links to Fuhrman apply only if he committed the Bundy murders and framed O.J. Simpson.

My Castle Keep link between Lancaster and Fuhrman was weakened by the fact that Lancaster was a major, not a colonel. In the US Army and Marines there are two ranks of colonel. A lieutenant colonel wears a silver oak leaf insignia. A “full bird” colonel wears a silver eagle.  

In the Night Gallery’s “A Question of Fear”, Leslie Nielson is a one-eyed retired colonel who accepts a bet from a man named Mazi that requires him to stay overnight in a hunted house. He searches the house with a flashlight. A cobweb nearly hits him in the face before he destroys it. He gets blood on his hand and encounters ghosts. The leather glove is in the next Night Gallery story on the hands of a Nazi general with an eagle on his cap. He takes them off to have supper with Count Dracula. You will find several of these elements in The Ninth Configuration and all of them in Fuhrman’s story of fining the Rockingham glove.  

I followed bird links to Sergeant Rutledge with Billie Burk as Cordeilia Fosgate, the wife of the presiding colonel in Sgt. Braxton Rutledge’s court martial. Billie Fuhrman was Mark Fuhrman’s mother. I suspected that The Wizard of OZ was special to Fuhrman because of Billie Burk, the dead woman’s shoes and the people Dorothy killed. Billie Burk is Glenda the Good Witch of the North in OZ who put the ruby slippers of the first dead witch on Dorothy’s feet and told her how to use them to get back to her Aunt Emily’s farm in Kansas. Fuhrman’s description of his home in Idaho where he raises “horses, sheep and goats” sounds like a ranch. He calls it a farm.  

In Sergeant Rutledge, Billie Burk is a witness in the trial of a Buffalo Soldier accused of murdering a white teenage girl and her father in Fort Lenten Arizona. O.J. broke NFL rushing records with the Buffalo Bills.  

I wasn’t looking for a one eye reference in Sergeant Rutledge but an Army captain with a patch over one eye said something when he was playing cards with Colonel Otis Fosgate that caught my attention. It wasn’t big enough to recall but it was enough to make me notice an odd pattern. In the “Fuhrman collection,” the network of movies I connected to Fuhrman before Murder in Greenwich was aired, someone or something with one eye or one peculiar eye was overly represented. Then I remembered the glasses in the envelope next to Fuhrman’s shoe in the pointing finger photo.

Dr. Henry Lee noticed something on one of the lenses that looked like a fingerprint in blood. He was not allowed to examine it closely. When a photo of the glasses was taken the lens was missing.  No one ever found the missing lens or explained what happened to it. The only other people who claimed to have seen a fingerprint in blood on the Bundy murder scene were Mark Fuhrman and his partner Brad Roberts. Roberts did not testify in court. Neither of them made sure that a photo was taken. 

When you follow a suspected link from something in Fuhrman’s history to a movie or from something in a movie to another movie you expect some things to match up. The idea is to look for other things you didn’t expect. If you find enough of them in the right configuration you know you’ve made a positive connection. Fore instance: Burt Lancaster’s role in Castle Keep had to be closely related to leather gloves or a distinctive shoeprint to mean anything. He wears leather gloves and he finds a distinctive shoeprint. The suspected link has tested positive. 

Lancaster is the Army general in The Cassandra Crossing with O.J. as an Interpol agent posing as a priest. He is the Pentagon’s Chairman of the Joint Chiefs in Seven Days in May, an Air Force general who plots to overthrow the United States government. Kirk Douglas is a Marine Crops colonel in the Pentagon who discovers the plot and foils it. In The Vikings Douglas loses an eye to a falcon. In Ulysses, Douglas is the title character whose Trojan horse ploy was the key to opening the gates of Troy for Greek victory over the Trojans. On his way home to his wife Penelope – before he succumbs to the spell of a witch, his men are turned into pigs, his ship is wrecked and ghosts tell him how they died.    

Ulysses learns that a giant is on an uncharted island when one of his warriors falls into a footprint as big as his whole body. The giant is Polyphemus, the half-god/half Gorgon Cyclops. The blood from his decapitated mother gave birth to the winged horse Pegasus. This one-eyed brute is the son of the sea god Neptune and Medusa – the mortal Gorgon with snakes for hair. He is special because of the “Mothers” poem on Bundy, Fuhrman’s Greek goddess of victory shoes (Nikes) and his snakeskin boots. Polyphemus traps Ulysses and his soldiers in a cave, takes a bite out of one of them and holds the rest for dining and snacking another day. Ulysses introduces him to wine. Polyphemus says it looks like blood. Ulysses uses it to put the one-eyed giant to sleep so he can blind him and escape.  

Burt Lancaster is U.S. Army Maj. Falconer in Castle Keep. World War II is in its final days and Falconer with seven solders is billeting in a Belgian castle. Falconer finds a boot print in the snow. He identifies the boot that made it as a German soldier’s because American military boots do not have hobnails. The only place you will find nails in a boot is in the heel. My own military experience left me with no doubt that someone with military training made the heel print in Fuhrman’s pointing finger photo. During O.J.’s civil trial I concluded that only Nazi memorabilia collector Mark Fuhrman could have made the heel print. 

I didn’t see Castle Keep until 2001. I knew Peter Falk was in it and I was interested in him because of his role as Columbo in the TV series and because he was a killer in Murder Inc. with May Britt. I looked up other movies he was involved in and singled out Castle Keep because of what Fuhrman wrote about The Magic Castle in Murder in Brentwood. Murder in Greenwich wasn’t even mentioned as a possible movie at the time and I had no interest in reading the book until the movie trailers appeared on TV in late October or early November 2002. I was focusing on how Murder in Brentwood and other things that Fuhrman wrote, said or did related to something similar in the movies.  

Fuhrman did not include his name on his Bundy notes header until he put the notes in his book. The first name he mentions in those notes is Sgt. Rossi. In Castle Keep Peter Falk is Sgt. Rossi. The black man in the background is Al Freeman Jr. as PFC. Benjamin who Rossi says “thinks Word War II was invented so he could write a book about it.” As Rossi takes Benjamin and three other enlisted men to a place called The Red Queen in a stolen car he gives Benjamin these words of advice, “Don’t forget to mention early in your book that you are young, Negro, unpublished and unscrewed.” When they get to town the car breaks down.  

The one-eye link I followed to Castle Keep was Peter Falk. He has a glass eye. May Britt who appeared with Falk in Murder Inc., was married to the black singer, musician, impressionist, actor, tap-dancer Sammy Davis Jr. who lost an eye in a car wreck. 

Go back to my auto mechanic story. I conceived it and inserted it where I did because I needed a neutral example of what you have to do to test any theory. In retrospect I can see where the elements that made it up came from. You can do the same thing with the Murder in Brentwood book and the Murder in Greenwich movie for the same reasons. When you reach for one thing in your mind everything you associated with it clings to it to some extent. You have to shake off the associations to draw out the “pure” elements but you can’t shake off everything. Some associations are as strong as the thing itself and you recall them, too. If they are stronger you recall them instead and group them accordingly.  

If you had asked me where my mechanic story came from I would have told you that I imagined it. I would have told you that I had no special reason for picking a British sports car and I didn’t specify the repair because it was irrelevant. I would have told you that I picked a black man as the person representing himself as Joe Park because I needed a man for the alternate scenario I had in mind who was obviously not Korean. I also needed someone who spoke with a foreign accent that most Americans recognize but have difficulty understanding. If you take the story apart having read everything that followed and factor in the one-sentence paragraph that preceded it, you will get better explanations for my specific choices than I thought I had when I made them.   

Mechanic is another name for hitman. I probably drew on Peter Falk’s role as a Jewish hitman in Murder, Inc. as well as Forrest Whittaker’s role as Dekker, the black hitman in Diary of a Hitman. Dekker kills a man in a parking garage. In Kiss Me Deadly, Albert Dekker’s character kills an auto mechanic named Nick who has a heavy Greek accent while Nick is working in his auto repair garage. The “Britt” association in my story to Sammy Davis Jr. needs no explanation. The Korean association to Sammy does require an explanation.  

In a 1960 Emmy Award-winning episode of General Electric Theater called “The Patsy”, Sammy Davis Jr. is Pvt. Johnson, a mentally retarded man who was accidentally drafted into the Army during the Korean War. Johnson is the patsy for a practical joker who pretends to be his friend for the exclusive purpose of making fun of him. The jokester’s last practical joke backfires when he drops a dummy pineapple grenade expecting “the patsy” to run in terror. Instead, Johnson pounces on the grenade to save his buddy’s life. I don’t think anyone who saw that show ever forgot it.  

You see what this has to do with Murder in Greenwich when you see in rapid succession a pine tree, an apple and Caroline pulling the ring in her ear when she says, “You’re going to be an electrician. Twenty-eight seconds later you see the photo of Fuhrman shaking hands with Nixon. Sammy Davis Jr. was a JFK. supporter during his “Camelot” administration. He was a member of the “Rat Pack,” along with Frank Sinatra, who starred in The Manchurian Candidate and Robin and His Seven Hoods with Peter Falk and Peter Lawford. Peter Lawford was Robert and Ethel Kennedy’s brother-in-law. And maybe you forgot that Robert’s wife Ethel was a Skakel. In Salt and Pepper Peter Lawford and Sammy Davis Jr. are partners in a London nightclub.  

During the 1972 Presidential campaign Sammy Davis Jr. gave Richard Nixon a “Hollywood hug” live on stage in front of a television audience. Sammy converted to Judaism and Satanism. He had an affair with Kim Novak, Gillian the witch in Columbia’s Bell Book and Candle (’58) who sheds a tear from one eye when she falls in love and loses her powers. “Sammy” did great impersonations of Burt Lancaster and Kirk Douglas. Appearing as himself in the 1970s comedy series All in the Family with Carroll O’Connor as Archie Bunker the lovable racist, sexist, homophobic, all around bigot, he kissed Archie smack on the lips. For a real bigot, that hilarious kiss had to be a smack in the face. All in the Family’s liberal producer Norman Leer obviously intended it to be. 

Archie Bunker is the head of the Bunker household. His wife’s name is Edith. His adult, live-in daughter is Gloria. His ultra liberal live-in son-in-law is Michael. Archie calls Edith “dingbat.” He calls Michael “meathead.” He calls Jews “hebs,” and Hispanics “spics.” In casual conversation he calls black people “jungle bunnies.” When he wants to be polite or put down another ethnic group in comparison to black people he says, “the coloreds.” He is a strong conservative Nixon man.

The show was controversial, not only because of Archie’s use of ethnic slurs but because many Americans didn’t get the joke on Archie. They liked him because he said what they thought. They got the jokes on Edith, Gloria and Michael. They thought that what he said about blacks, Jews, Hispanics and gays was true. They never considered the source…. 

Remember Kim Hunter in Witch Hunt? Remember where Phil Lovecraft tells her that his favorite part of a movie he saw her in is where the fat plumber comes in? Harpo Marx emerging from the suds is only half of the joke. To get everything you have to know about the “fat plumber” in Bell, Book, and Candle with Kim Novak as Gillian the barefoot witch.  

Jimmy Stewart is Shepherd Henderson who has broken Gillian’s love spell on him. She tells him that she is going to take it out on his former fiancé Merle. She says she is going to make her travel. The “plumber” is a generic reference to the next stranger Merle sees when Gillian’s spell takes affect, “the mailman, the plumber, the window washer.” Gillian tells Shepherd that she will make Merle fall for him. Merle is a rich, cruel, gorgeous snob with expensive tastes. She has a great eye for abstract art. She’s in her early 30s, lives on an upper floor of a swank Manhattan apartment building and has a maid named Betty.  

Janice Rule as Merle is painting a vertical edge of her canvas while Shephard tries to warn her of Gillian's threats and her power as a witch to carry them out. Merle tells him he just never learned to spell. Betty announces that the extermination man wants to know if he can come in. Shepherd tells Merle not to let him in or he will seduce her. Merle tells Betty to let him in. He is about 60 years old, considerably overweight and, of course, a lower class working stiff – like Archie Bunker. With a derisive smile Merle tells him to “start in the bedroom” and makes fun of Shepherd by growling at the exterminator as he passes her, barking like a dog (a bitch in heat) and winking her eye.  

Look again at Gillian’s “mailman, plumber, window washer” sequence of possible love objects for Merle, then at the exterminator. With his jacket, his bug spry dispenser under his forearm hanging by a strap over his shoulder and his hand on the nozzle, he looks like a composite of all three. Note the big window behind Shepherd and Merle. Gillian’s spell doesn’t work because she has lost her powers. You see the tear in her eye that tells you what happened. You see an overhead view of people on the street. You see Elsa Lanchester as Gillian’s Aunt Queenie with a consoling hand on her shoulder as she sits before a mirror on her bedroom dresser crying over her lost love and lost powers.  

In four seconds of a Murder in Greenwich sequence you get a mailbox, a fat man with a garden hose, a woman in a jacket with a purse under her forearm hanging by a strap over her shoulder and a “widow washer.” You get the mannequins standing behind a big window, bedroom furniture and figurines of two dogs side-by-side. One dog is a German shepherd.  

Expanding that scene to six minutes you get an overhead view of people on the murder scene, barking dogs and a kitchen sink faucet. A friend of Dorothy Moxley consoles the weeping woman with a hand on her shoulder. Dorothy tells Det. Carroll that she was upstairs painting when she heard raised voices and dogs barking. You see her painting the vertical edge of a widow sill and quick shots of barking dogs. One of the barking dogs is her dog Max, a German shepherd.  

Another thing you get in those six minutes is the CBS logo painted on the side of a news van and on the microphones of two reporters. You see the eye distinctly six times, twice before Det. Carroll’s Halloween Day interview with Martha’s mother Dorothy and four times afterwards. You also get one eye in the form of a man in a brown leather jacket pointing a camera lens at the camera filming the movie – one glass eye.  

The Resurrected with Chris Sarandon as Dr. Ash has a man with one bad eye and a blonde woman who does the same things in a private eye’s office that Rob Mathers does in Murder in Greenwich. The scene even begins the same way with a shot of skyscrapers on a waterfront.

The Rosary Murders links all of these elements at the wake of a Catholic priest murdered on Ash Wednesday, the day that kicks off the 40 day Lenten season preceding Easter. Charles Durning as Father Neighbors takes eyeglasses off the dead man’s face and tries them on, putting a hand over each lens in turn. You see a rosary in the dead man’s hands. The French connection is the City of Detroit where the gathering takes place with Father Koesler and two future murder victims in attendance. The word puzzle is in the names of the victim and future victims. You won’t see the incest link until halfway through the movie when a nun tells Father Koesler the motive for the killings. Stefan Gierasch’s appearance in the crowd gives you Fuhrman’s birthday.  

In Murder in Brentwood Mark Fuhrman sounds like Father Koesler (page 130) as he describes finding a killer but being unable to tell what he knows because of a “sacred” oath. He writes, “My word to suspects, informants, and citizens has got to be held as sacred as the oath I took when I became a policeman.” This comes three pages after he talks about investigating the death of a black Los Vegas man in 1995 whose hammer-bludgeoned body was put in a car trunk and dumped in an alley in LA. You will see these elements in a 1994 one-eye Robocop link. That fiction story takes place in Detroit. Fuhrman makes the end of the “real” story in his 1997 book sound as though he is at a wake in Los Vegas. 

Father Koesler becomes a detective when a man confesses that he is the killer. Koesler cannot break the seal of confession so he has to find the pattern that will let him tell the cops who the next victim will be. He finds it in children’s drawing of the Ten Commandments. Josef Sommer is a killer cop in Witness with Kelly McGillis. In Chances Are, he is the judge that Louie captures on camera taking a bribe from a mobster. Here, he’s a good cop. He tells Koesler in a Greek Town restaurant named Pegasus, “The rosary’s are just to let us know that he is making a puzzle – like guessing a word with some of the letters missing.”  

In Greek Mythology the winged horse Pegasus sprang from the blood of a Gorgon with snakes for hair when a hero, led to her by three women with one eye between them, used his shield as a mirror to decapitate her. Looking at her directly would have turned him to stone.

If the Bundy murders were a movie in progress you would know early on that it will have puzzles but it won’t be a mystery. You see a beautiful blonde (Medusa had a beautiful face) sitting before a mirror with a swollen eye. You see her in sunglasses with a crucifix around her neck. Her ex-husband has a history of battering. You get photos, 911 tapes and a story about him pulling her hair. You see a tall, handsome, brilliant hero with a shiny gold shield and enough flaws to make him human. Now you know who the murder victim is going to be and you know who is going to make the observations no one else makes and ask the right people the right questions nobody else thought to ask. You know who is going to find the evidence everyone else missed to make the big arrest.  

In Jack the Ripper (’88), the police commissioner believes that a special lens might capture the image of the killer in the victim’s eyes if she were looking at him when she died. In Robocop: The Series, Robocop retrieves the killer’s image from one eye. In Murder in Brentwood, Mark Fuhrman says, “In her final seconds of life Nicole looks into her murderer’s eyes.” In Murder in Greenwich Fuhrman names Jack the Ripper seconds before the camera zooms in on a murder suspect’s eye. 

Murderous Vision (’91) begins at night in a quiet industrial area with huge storage tanks and a railroad track. A van rolls into the picture with a headlight out. Rookie cop Martha Ryan pulls the “one-eyed” van over to issue the driver a ticket. The driver shoots Martha in the back. Tossing back her head and flinging out her arms with the impact of the bullet in her back she falls to the ground just as Martha Moxley does in Murder in Greenwich (Martha Moxley’s head should have gone forward because she was hit in the back of the head). A Missing Persons detective learns that a case he is working on involving a psychic named Elizabeth is linked to Martha’s murder. He is not supposed to investigate murder cases but his boss tells him that he will “turn a blind eye.” 

You’re not going to see Ann Skakel dying in bed with rosary beads in her hand or Fuhrman’s puzzles with some of the letters missing for another few chapters but when you see them you will recall this chapter. 

Do you think you should see more “one-eyed wonders?” You will.