Chapter 18

I ended the previous chapter with actress Veronica Cartwright for several reasons: She portrays Ethel Skakel Kennedy in Robert Kennedy & His Times. She is Cathy in The Birds. Her brother in The Birds is Mitch. The actress who plays her mother is Jessica Tandy, Emily’s employer in The House on Carroll Street. Veronica Cartwright’s birthday is the same as Adolph Hitler’s. Her sister Angela is Penney Robinson in Lost in Space, a TV series title with a direct link to Fuhrman’s depiction of Martha Moxley in Murder in Greenwich.

The Murder in Greenwich drive from the train station scene features an exchange of dialog where Ethel Skakel’s marriage to Robert Kennedy becomes the focal point of the book. Weeks says, “That won’t hurt the book.” Fuhrman replies, “If the Kennedy’s weren’t involved there wouldn’t be a book.” If Veronica Cartwright hadn’t played Ethel Kennedy she wouldn’t be a Kennedy link to Fuhrman. If she hadn’t played Cathy in The Birds there wouldn’t be a Cartwright link to lynching, burning and Larry Bird or a birthday link to Fuhrman and Hitler, the personification of genocidal racism.   

As Cathy in The Birds, Veronica Cartwright tells Mitch’s new girlfriend Melanie that he is a lawyer who defends “hoods.” She tells Melanie that his present client shot his wife in the head six times. “Six times! Even twice would be overdoing it,” she says. In Murder in Greenwich Fuhrman tells Weeks that Marta, who took seven “shots” to the head with a golf club, was the victim of a rage killing. Andrew Mitchell is Stephen Weeks. The hood is on Steve Carroll’s station wagon. 

In The Birds, Cathy tells Melanie that she is having a “surprise” birthday party. Her real birthday goes to Fuhrman in the ride from the train station in three ways: Fuhrman had to explain away circumstances where he was linked to the Nazi swastika and the letter Kathleen Bell (Kathy) wrote describing an incident where he, like Hitler, advocated genocide (burning “niggers’). One of the scandals surrounding Robert Kennedy’s brother John was that he had a sexual affair with a Nazi spy during World War II. In Murder in Brentwood Fuhrman makes four references to birthdays; Nicole’s, his wife’s, Christmas and O.J.’s daughter Sydney’s. He said that on Sydney’s birthday, O.J. played golf.

When I was following pizza, birthday and sports links, I noticed that the name Jennifer came up disproportionately. Pier 17 where the Murder in Greenwich scene with Michelle Blanchard begins is a restaurant chain that features gourmet pizzas. The Moxley family’s ties to Michigan underscored the name Blanchard, which took me to Society, a movie involving incest, and to Jennifer Granholm the Michigan Attorney General under Governor Jim Blanchard. In 2002 she ran for Governor and won. Her birthday is February 5, the same as Fuhrman’s. In Larry Bird’s last college basketball game against the Michigan State Spartans, led by number 32 Magic Johnson, Bird’s Indiana Hoosiers lost.   

Following golf links and Nazi links I found that the name Jennifer converged on birthdays and valentines. Actor Vic Morrow’s birthday is Valentine’s Day, and Jason Robards is Al Capone in The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre.  They were close friends and Jennifer Jason Lee is Morrow’s daughter. She took the stage name Jason from Jason Robards. Her birthday is February 5. The closest I came to an actress who matched the traits linking Fuhrman’s characterization of Martha Moxley to Lisa Bonet in Angel Heart was Jennifer Jason Leigh in Single White Female. Her character’s birthday in that movie is significant because her twin sister died and she becomes obsessed with making herself her roommate’s twin. 

I then checked the birthday of other actors who appeared frequently and unexpectedly in movies linked to something Fuhrman said or did in the O.J. case. I got Charlotte Rampling and Barbara Hershey. They were born of February 5. A black character named Henry Aaron Winkler in the pilot episode of Robocop: The Series led me to discover that baseball Hall of Famer Hank Aaron was born on February 5. In that pilot show Cliff DeYoung is Dr. Cray Z Mallardo. In Robert Kennedy & His Times, he’s Ethel Skakel Kennedy’s brother-in-law, John F. Kennedy.  

When you see what flows from the Angela Cartwright link you will understand why I saved it for the last part of the preceding chapter. 

Fuhrman said the political cartoon he kept on his desk at work of the Nazi swastika flag rising from the rubble of the fallen Berlin wall was a reminder of a strong, united Germany’s bloody history. He said that he kept it because he admired the cartoonist’s ability to evoke “such subtle and disturbing thoughts” with “a single image.” Whether or not you accept that explanation, the explanation itself tells you that he was big on the power of symbolism to provoke subtle and disturbing thoughts. It tells you that he was aware of this power before the Bundy murders and before he had his picture taken with the bloody glove, knit cap, heel print and valentine-shaped pool of blood clustered around his finger. 

Murder in Greenwich is big on symbolism. Mark Fuhrman can’t show his character wearing a swastika or an inverted pentagram (which you also have with the Congressional Medal of Honor). But to draw a perfect swastika, you need an x inside of a diamond. To draw a perfect pentagram you need to connect the five points on a pentagon – like on the bottom of Fuhrman’s beer glass in the “Why I lied” scene with Steve Carroll. You can make the swastika and the pentagram with the dots on Fuhrman’s red necktie.  

“Fire-brewed” Stroh’s beer came to Detroit with a German immigrant. Detroit was a hotbed of American Nazi activity during the German Chancellorshiip of Adolph Hitler. Murder in Greenwich provokes those subtle and disturbing thoughts with a single image – if you know what to look for. The beauty of symbols like this is that you have to complete them yourself, which allows Fuhrman to deny that he intended them to be seen the way you drew them. They are “Lewis Cyphres,” ciphers that are obvious when you know they are ciphers and you have all the information in one still frame required to decipher them.    

In Kathleen Bell’s letter to O.J.’s defense attorneys and prosecutors concerning her Marine Corps Recruiting Office encounter with Mark Fuhrman she wrote, "Officer Fuhrman went on to say that he would like nothing more than to see all niggers gathered together and killed.”   The only modification she made on the witness stand to her written statement came when F. Lee Bailey asked her whether everything she wrote in her letter was true. In the letter she wasn’t sure whether Fuhrman said “burned” or “bombed.” In her answer to Bailey’s question she said, “I know now that he said ‘Gather together and burned.’"

American History students of lynching inevitably run across a 1919 postcard featuring a festive, white, Indiana crowd burning a black man. Hangings were called “necktie parties.” Burnings were “barbeques.” 

Bell testified that she and Andrea Terry, the woman she intended to introduce Fuhrman to before his genocidal racist outburst, saw him sitting at a table with a sandy-haired woman in a bar called Hennessey’s. She testified that she and Terry were in the bar when Fuhrman and his companion came in. She testified that she didn’t drink alcohol. When you see Fuhrman and Carroll setting at the table in the bar in Murder in Greenwich with Fuhrman lifting the pentagonal beer glass to his lips, you know it’s a symbolic representation of his second encounter with Bell.  

If you followed the trial closely and recall Fuhrman’s testimony before the McKinney tapes became public, you know that you are getting Fuhrman’s commentary on Kathleen Bell’s testimony. Bailey had the letter when he asked Fuhrman about his use of the n-word “in the past ten years.” When Fuhrman denied using it only Bell’s letter said otherwise. The prosecution had an impressive lineup of witnesses including a black female, Assistant DA to testify for Fuhrman if the defense chose to put Bell on their witness lists. In Fuhrman’s Murder in Greenwich tavern conversation with Carroll he says, “They asked if I used that word; I lied.” Carroll says, “It took a lot more than that to loose the case. Fuhrman says, “That’s all anyone remembers.” 

Fuhrman isn’t talking about what he said to Kathleen Bell in the recruiting office. He’s talking about what he said about her in his book, Murder in Brentwood.   He said that the incident never occurred and he had witnesses to prove it. He argued that her testimony made no sense. “And if she was so hurt and offended, why would she play matchmaker and try to set me up with her friend if I was such an evil man? I find it uncanny that she could remember these ten-year-old incidents so clearly, particularly since one of them purportedly occurred in a bar where she had probably been drinking.”  

Fuhrman’s version of his lie is all that most people remember. They remember that he got caught using the n-word on tape. They blamed him for losing the case. They don’t remember that Marcia Clark introduced Bell’s letter into evidence before the tapes became public. They don’t remember that his Murder in Brentwood comments about Bell didn’t match her testimony but her letter and her testimony match the context in which Fuhrman used “that word” on the tapes. They don’t recall that Fuhrman reshuffled the time sequence to make it appear that Bell attempted to introduce him to Andrea Terry in the bar after the incident in the recruiting office. Time tampering is a Fuhrman signature.  

Media pundits and outraged citizens trashed Johnny Cochran for accurately comparing Fuhrman’s genocidal racist rhetoric to Hitler’s before his rise to power. His point was that power makes all the difference in what to take seriously. The knock against Cochran was that he used the Hitler analogy inappropriately to shift the blame for his black client’s murder of a Jew to a white cop whose only crime was using a bad word. The knock against Fuhrman was that he lied unnecessarily.  

The entire scene with Mark Fuhrman and Steve Carroll in the bar was carefully set up to improve on Fuhrman’s previous explanations for committing perjury. In Murder in Brentwood he said that he didn’t commit perjury, his memory just failed him – perhaps because deep down he was ashamed to admit that he had used the word. He also said that he didn’t think his use of the word in a private conversation where he was only “playacting” would ever be used the way it was. But in Murder in Greenwich he clears himself completely by giving a noble and opinion-poll-tested reason for lying, not forgetting the truth or believe that the truth was irrelevant. In classic Fuhrman form, he puts the key words in someone else’s mouth. 

Carroll tells Fuhrman sympathetically, “Well, you know what would have happened if you told the truth?” 

Fuhrman says. “You damn right, the trial would become about me.” 

“And it did.” 

“And it did. I was the one that got convicted and that son of a bitch walked free.”

Nine seconds after Fuhrman’s lament about the injustice he suffered in the O.J. case you see Carroll cooking on the grill. Fuhrman says, “That one is burning” as he spears a hotdog with a fork. No, it’s not a pitchfork but does it have to be for you to see the Devil’s hand at work? A hotdog isn’t a sinner burning in hell but to be a symbol for one it has to be something else – the way a baseball bat symbolizes a golf club or a pumpkin symbolizes a girl’s head. The way Fuhrman tells it, he was the hotdog and Marcia Clark was the hand spearing him with the fork. In his movie he puts the fork in his own hand and spears two “hotdogs.”  

Perhaps you noticed that you could go as easily from Fuhrman’s “conviction” to Charles Beaumont’s “Shadow Play” as you could go from the pentagonal beer glass bottom to the Devil’s pitchfork. I’m sure that Fuhrman gave it plenty of thought. He paints himself as a figurative lynching victim in Murder in Brentwood, blasting Marcia Clark for not using “fire and brimstone” He writes, “In her closing, Maria Clark not only indicted me, but she also tried, convicted, and figuratively sentenced me to death…without appeal to reason or evidence.”  

That’s literally what happens to lynching victims and to Dennis Weaver as Adam Grant in Beaumont’s “Shadow Play.” Grant claims that everyone in his world is a creature of his recurring nightmare of being tried sentenced and electrocuted on the same day. When he dies the people in his dream die and some of them come back in the same dream as different characters. He says “The people get twisted around but it’s the same dream.” Sounds like hell, doesn’t it? 

A reporter at the trial has an awful feeling that Grant might be right. He goes to the DA’s house drunk and determined to get drunker. The DA has a roaring fire going in the fireplace. His wife has steaks broiling in the oven. The reporter persuades the DA to visit Grant in his death row cell where Grant rattles him with inconsistencies in the one-day procedure that is going to get him electrocuted at midnight. It’s too much like movies Grant has seen with characters, sets, props and situations that don’t quite mesh. He makes a convincing case but the DA leaves unconvinced. On his way out Grant tells him that his wife is cooking a stake but when he gets home it will be something else. When the DA gets home he opens the oven door and finds a pot roast.

Whether or not Chares Beaumont made conscious connections between ovens and genocide, the Indiana barbeque postcard and the Indiana electric chair, the connections exist (Michael Jackson, by the way, is from Indiana). The people, places and methods of execution get twisted around but it’s the same pattern. You can see it in the Christopher Meloni links to O.J. Simpson, the Veronica Cartwright links to Michael Skakel and the Devil’s guiding hand in Angel Heart. But you need movie producer Mark Fuhrman’s guiding hand to do it. 

In Murder in Greenwich, you hear the Devil mentioned by name only through Martha’s “Lord of the Flies” description of the Skakel house Veronica Cartwright’s sister Angela is the key to Don McLean’s “lost in space” lyrics from “American Pie.” When Tommy came on to Martha in the bond fire scene where she bit the tip of her finger, he invited her to his house to party. Instead of telling her when to come over, he told her to listen to the music. “American Pie” is the song coming from the Skakel house that prompts her to sneak out of her house to find Tommy.  

As you see Martha running across the lawn, you get a link to an inverted cross behind her. It’s a weak link because it’s hard to tell whether the white flowers in the background that form the cross above the lawn are in the picture or in your mind like things you see in clouds. But you see it again in a closer view with Martha coming home late from another party singing “American Pie.” The “lost in space” lyrics you hear the first time you see the inverted cross don’t help to clarify what you saw unless you know what comes next – the “American Pie” words that begin where they end in Murder in Greenwich. You hear: 

Oh, and there we were all in one place

A generation lost in space

With no time left to start again

So come on Jack be nimble, Jack be quick

Jack Flash sat on a candle stick… 

You see Martha working her way though a field of purple flowers into the front yard of the Skakel house. You see kids standing around muscle cars, a burning lamp in the open side door of a van and a two-tiered fountain. When she gets inside the house the “American Pie” music dies. In its place you hear Jimi Hendrix music, the music of the black guitarist you heard in the bonfire scene. You see candles burning and a large crowd of teenagers making out, drinking beer and hard liquor and smoking everything from cigarettes and cigars to marijuana joints and hashish pipes.  

These are the words from “American Pie” that the Hendrix music replaces – the words that follow “Jack Flash sat on a candlestick”: 

Because fire is the Devil's only friend 

Oh, and as I watched him on the stage

My hands were clenched in fists of rage

No angel born in hell

Could break that Satan's spell

And as the flames climbed high into the night

To light the sacrificial rite

I saw Satan laughing with delight

The day the music died

Part of the “bronkin’ buck/pickup truck” verse is what you hear when you see Martha with her friends and fires burning behind her. You hear it again with Martha singing to herself as she walks home late from a party along the path where someone that Fuhrman calls a “rage” killer will drag her body. Martha also sings the choirs, “Bye, bye Miss American pie. Drove my Chevy to the levee but the levee was dry…” You get Angel Heart links to the choirs with the two-tiered fountain in both movies closely linked to “epiphany” the Devil, an “angle” and a murdered teenage girl. In the Murder in Greenwich scene that fades into one where you see the fountain in the background, Martha says of Tommy Skakel, “Any attention I got from him felt like electricity.”

In Angel Heart a homicide detective tells Harry Angel that he is going to “burn.” He means that Angel is going to the electric chair. Angel knows that it also means he is going to burn in hell.  

Angela – as in Angela Cartwright, the sister of Veronica Cartwright – is a name derived from Angel. In Alien Veronica Cartwright lost her life in space but her sister was the first person I thought of when I heard the “lost in space” lyrics. I didn’t realize why until the “American Pie” music died with fragments of the next verse jangling in my head and I saw Martha wandering around in the house with candles burning everywhere she went. Toward the end of the Lost in Space series Angela Cartwright was about the age Martha was supposed to be. She was therefore the only character that bore any resemblance to Martha. It would have been difficult to think of anyone else.

The first time I watched Murder in Greenwich I expected to see links to O.J. Simpson, to a tombstone, a train, lit candles, water, a baseball bat, a Mercedes Benz and Fuhrman’s red necktie with the white spots. I saw all of those things. I was thrown completely when I didn’t see or hear a single reference to birthdays; Martha’s, Michael’s, Nicole’s, Sydney’s, O.J.’s, Fuhrman’s wife or kids’ or his own. I had given up when I recalled whom the unidentified man with the Van Dyke beard and phone at the train station reminded me of and I discovered Stephan Garish in Silver Steak. When I saw that his birthday was the same as Fuhrman’s, I started looking for other indirect birthday links in Murder in Greenwich.  

I found the Veronica Cartwright birthday link to Hitler by accident but it was inevitable that I would find it through my bird link search.  

Things take a revealing turn here with the Jimi Hendrix reference associated with Angela Cartwright and Martha Moxley. Jimi Hendrix, as you will see again in a later chapter, was a former paratrooper with the 101^st Airborne Division in Vietnam. He ended his stage concerts by violently smashing his guitar to bits. That was his performance signature. That’s why you hear his music in the scene with Martha walking through the Skakel house right after you see her skipping thought the purple flowers. That’s why you see kids smoking cigarettes and marijuana, to get one quick shot a purple haze.  “Purple Haze,” is a Jimi Hendrix song and an LSD brand name.  

You wouldn’t think that any of this would take you to Mike Hammer and loop back to Martha’s murder and Fuhrman’s birthday, but it does. 

Martha Moxley’s friend Sheila McGuire found her body on Halloween Day. That part of Fuhrman’s book agrees with the record. He added the birdcall to his movie and changed Sheila’s last name to Leguire. It says McGuire in the credits but Martha’s ghost says Leguire.   

A 1997 edition of Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer casts Stacy Keach as the title character in “Halloween.” The story begins with a close-up of a Jack O’ Lantern on the ground with a candle burning inside of it. Mike Hammer’s voiceover says, “Halloween Eve, Devil’s Night….” A man in leather gloves attacks a woman from behind, kills her, brands the letter “S” on her back, dumps her body in her bathtub and leaves a message on her wall in blood. If you’d known that the victim is Mike’s girlfriend, as a fan of the series, you would have expected her to die the moment you saw her. Violent death befalls most of the women Mike gets close to. 

A few bodies later, Mike learns that the killer is a psychiatrist he worked with on a book about a Devil-worshiping serial killer. Links to the Bundy murders in “Halloween” are few but the links to Fuhrman’s Murder in Greenwich movie are many. They include: a bail of hay, a pitchfork, an angel, a new book about an old murder case, the Pier 17 view of the New York skyline, a killer named Michael and a murder on Halloween Eve.   

In “Murder Takes All.” (’89) the woman Mike Hammer falls for gets a break when someone kidnaps him in New York and literally “drops him off” in Las Vegas, the town Mike calls “The Decadent Land of Oz.” A black man we later learn is a killer working with a former NFL football star puts him in a parachute harness and pushes him out of an airplane over the city. Mike lands in the street and miraculously finds his hat. He also finds a New York City subway token and a casino hotel key in his pocket. He thinks that Johnnie Roman, the man who called him in New York to work on a case he declined, is responsible for his kidnapping. He’s wrong.

Linda “Wonder Woman” Carter is Helen. She runs a charity for sick and crippled children. She knows that Roman, the father of her daughter, along with her daughter’s stepfather, a respected doctor, have been stealing from the charity. She knows that Johnny Roman wants Hammer to recover a book that proves his thievery. The woman who has the book is using it for blackmail. She has Hammer kidnapped and brought to Las Vegas to frame him for the murders of everyone involved in Roman’s scam – including a private detective named Bundy and the blackmailer, Barbara Leguire. 

Michelle Phillips, Mike’s witness with “one eye” in “Murder Takes All” is Chris in the 1983 pilot episode of Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer called “Murder Me, Murder You”. She is the mother of a daughter Mike didn’t know he had. Naturally, Chris gets killed. The police believe that her daughter Michelle was burned to death in a fiery car crash but Chris switched Michelle’s dental records with the victim’s to hide her identity. Mike finds Michelle in a scene that looks like it is going to turn into incest but both of them know whom the other is. Michelle tells Mike about waiting for him to call her on her birthdays. Naturally, she gets killed, too. She dies in a mannequin factory – on her birthday.   

“Murder Me, Murder You,” has two key bird links, one to a helicopter developed by an ex-marine and one to a carving on a tombstone. 

The abundance of bird links in Murder in Greenwich took me to Barbara Hershey as Harriet Bird in The Natural. The cookie-incest-college-boy link took me to Charlotte Rampling in D.O.A. The Kennedy women, one eye, blood and water, finger in mouth links took me to Jennifer Jason Leigh in Single White Female. A multiplicity of links to Robocop: The Series took me to Hank Aaron. Then it hit me that I was missing the most obvious birthday link. The 1997 success of Fuhrman’s Murder in Greenwich book followed the success of Murder in Brentwood, which followed the “responsible” verdict in O.J.’s wrongful death civil trial. That verdict was handed down on Feb 5, 1997 -- Greenwich time.  

Happy birthday Mark.