Chapter 19

Ask most sports fans to name their top three athletes of all time and chances are they will hesitate. They will probably want to give the question some thought and shuffle the order a few times as they attempt to answer. When F. Lee Bailey asked Mark Fuhrman on the witness stand to name his favorite athletes he named George Foreman, Michael Jordan and Larry Bird with no reflection and a cryptic smirk. In Murder in Brentwood he again named Forman, Jordan and Bird in a comment on how poorly Christopher Darden prepared him to testify. 

The testimony preparation explained how he could answer the question as quickly and smoothly as he did in court but it raised other questions. He mentioned the prep question parenthetically in his book as his answer to a typical unproductive question Darden asked him. If the question was unproductive why bother to give the answer? Why suggest that he rattled off the names to Darden the same way he rattled them off to Bailey? The answer had to be more important to Fuhrman than the question. He must have thought about those names shortly before or after the Bundy murders or they meant so much to him that he didn’t have to think about them. Either way, they had to mean more to him than the names of sports figures he said he admired.  

I found the gambling link to all three names, the “Georgia Peach” link to the first one and an MF link to the last one. But they don’t stop there. 

In the paragraph after Fuhrman makes his forced reference to George Forman, Michael Jordan and Larry Bird, he makes a big deal out of a black baseball cap with green letters spelling, “Black Law” in Christopher Darden’s office. On the next page he describes Darden presenting a different face to the media in a People magazine article than the one Darden showed him. That whole business with Forman, Jordan, Bird, the black baseball cap and the People magazine article seemed familiar. When I compared it to relevant scenes in Memoirs of an Invisible Man and The Dark Half I knew why. With George Stark in his black baseball cap telling Liz Beaumont about the book he planned to write, everything clicked into place.  

George Stark always writes with a black pencil labeled Black Beauty. The law, in the form of Michael Rooker as Sheriff Pangborn and two Connecticut State Police troopers, pay Thad a visit when Stark kills Homer because Thad’s fingerprints where found in Homer’s blood. Thad doesn’t know what happened – and he can’t explain the bird sounds he hears as Pangborn gives him the news. Stark leaves a message in blood on his second victim’s wall. It says, “The sparrows are flying again.”  

George Stark’s next three targets are Miriam Cowley, Michael Donaldson and Miriam’s ex-husband Rick. The Cowley’s arranged the People magazine article announcing Stark’s burial. Mike wrote it. Stark cuts Miriam’s throat and goes after Mike. Quipping, “I guess I’ll have to punt,” he uses his steel-toed cowboy boot to kill Mike with a vicious kick to the head. He then kills Rick, the cops that were guarding him and a window washer who frightened Rick with a Happy Face placard.  You don’t see Stark kill the window washer. You don’t have to. You see the Happy Face placard on the bodies of the dead cops and you see Stark exiting the multiple-murder scene alone on the window washer’s scaffolding.  This time, and from this point on, you see Stark wearing black leather gloves. 

Those of you who don’t know what the Happy Face has to do with Mark Fuhrman need to know that O.J. customarily wrote “Peace and Love” in his autographs with a Happy Face below it. He put it in the O part of O.J. He singed his name that way in the letter he wrote before his June 17 arrest.  Fuhrman reproduced the letter in Murder in Brentwood. Sammy Davis Jr. used “piece and love” as his salutation. In Three Days of the Condor the place where Joe Turner worked was called Section 17. Everyone who “Lucifer” murdered there had the code name of a bird. 

Murder in Brentwood comes up five times in the Murder in Greenwich movie. In case you missed it in the probation office scene, he gives it to you with copies of the book stacked three deep in the packing-for-Greenwich scene. If you have a hardback copy of the book you can see that the books in the movie are slightly different. The dust jacket has a red band across the top. The other major elements are there, only some of them, like Fuhrman’s name and the publisher’s castle logo on the spine, are rearranged.

Murder in Brentwood combined with Murder in Spokane and Fuhrman’s Murder in Greenwich book and movie contain enough detailed information to nail Fuhrman for the Simpson-Goldman murders. The Nazi and satanic stuff in his movie had to have been staged with the “great artistry” of the Bundy murder scene that “provoke such subtle and disturbing thoughts” about O.J. with “a single image.” Mark Fuhrman does it in nearly every scene. He even signs his name in red ink the way the historical Jack The Ripper and at least three movie Rippers did to symbolize blood. Ever see a movie where someone sells his soul to the Devil for fame and fortune by sighing his name in blood? Sure you have.  

“Signature” has more than one meaning. In Murder in Spokane, Fuhrman’s book about his involvement in the Spokane Washington serial killer hunt, he says this: “Signature is a distinct method of torture, killing, or staging – arranging the body or crime scene – common to all victims…A signature is the unique act that fulfills the serial killer’s psychosexual fantasies.” By that definition, the Bundy killer’s signature was the same as Mark Fuhrman’s in his investigation of the murders, in his Brentwood book and in his Greenwich movie. He saturated them with slightly rearranged plots, costumes, props, shots, motives characters and “action,” from movie and TV shows strongly linked to him or O.J. 

Look at what red ink has to do with blood evidence in the O.J. Simpson case and Fuhrman’s February 19, 1997 interview on 20/20….  

O.J. claimed that he got the deep cut in his finger from a glass he shattered in his hand in his Chicago motel room when he heard the news about Nicole’s death. Chicago police photographed the bathroom sink with the broken glass where he said he deposited the glass and cleaned the wound (blood and water/face in mirror). Chicago police also photographed the bloody bed sheet that O.J. said he used to staunch the bleeding. The large cut was essential to Marcia Clark’s case because only a cut that size could have left the blood drops identified as O.J.’s on the Bundy walkway leading to the back gate. She spotted an ink pen in the Chicago bedding photo and argued inferentially that the stain on the sheet was red ink.

O.J.’s story was absurd but so was Marcia’s. She knew that Los Angeles police retrieved the bedding and it was blood, not red ink.  

When Dr. Henry Lee demonstrated the significance of various blood drop patterns he used red ink. His demonstration showed that a man walking toward the back gate could not have made the blood drop patterns on the Bundy walkway.  

Fuhrman’s 15^th Bundy crime scene note says, “Rear gate, inside dead bolt (turn knob type) poss blood smudge and visible fingerprint.”  

In Fuhrman’s ’97 20/20 Primetime Live interview with Diane Sawyer he elaborated on the note. He said that he saw a clear fingerprint in brass and he said that his partner Brad Roberts saw it, too. Roberts said on the show that he believed he saw it before Fuhrman did. Roberts told Sawyer, “The killer signed his name with that fingerprint.” Two seconds later you see the page where the note was written superimposed on the garage behind Nicole’s condo in fade-in transitions from Roberts to the condo to the note. You hear Diane Sawyer say, “If Lange and Vannatter missed seeing that signature themselves could they have learned that it existed from Fuhrman’s notes?  But if they read the notes why didn’t they focus on that bloody fingerprint?” 

The Murder in Greenwich signature tie-in to Marcia Clark’s red ink ploy happens 22 seconds after Roberts says, “The killer signed his name with that fingerprint.” This is time enough to show a clip of Vannatter testifying that he received Fuhrman’s notes. Fuhrman says he “asked Marcia Clark about that and she said, ‘Mark they never read your notes.’” Her name falls from Fuhrman’s lips at the 22-seond mark.  

Fuhrman’s signature on the Idaho probation office permission slip to go to Connecticut cannot be closer to the bloody fingerprint he described on 20/20. It even shows the tip of his finger and the name “BELLE HAVEN” hand printed like his notes on the portion of the form that you see above his signature. Belle Haven shouldn’t be on the form. It’s a community inside of Greenwich and he is asking permission to go to Greenwich. He says, “A young girl was murdered there 22 years ago.

The 20/20 tie-in to Belle Haven is in what Tom Lange says after Fuhrman says, “Marcia Clark.” He admits that he didn’t read the notes but calls Fuhrman’s story about the bloody fingerprint “ridiculous” because of the importance of such evidence. He says that it’s not something you put in a note and hope somebody will find. He says, “Bells should go off.” That phrase takes him two seconds to say. “Bells” falls on the 21-sceond mark. “Off” falls on the 22-second mark. 

In Jack the Ripper (’88) Frederick Abberline and his partner George compare a note written in red ink and signed “Jack the Ripper” to the bodies of two women who were killed after leaving the Ten Bells saloon. One note says he will cut his next victim’s ears off. The emphasis is on “off” because in the previous cases he cut the ears but in the latest case he cut the ears off. The next time you see the Ripper’s note it fades into a shot of the clock in the Greenwich England bell tower. 

Detective Tom Lange’s first name is not Tom. It’s Frederick. He was born in Milwaukee and saw heavy combat as a marine in Vietnam. Vannatter was an outstanding high school athlete who lettered in three sports. Although he didn’t make it to the Major Leagues he was a good enough pitcher to be scouted by the Cleveland Indians. Fuhrman never said he played baseball but several clues in his history led me to believe he was a picture who admired a 6’ 3” Detroit Tiger picture with his MF initials and the same first name. Vannatter and Lange were both born in April within a time span that covered Easter. Mark Fidrych was born in August, but his birth as a Major League pitcher came on April 20, Adolph Hitler’s birthday – a date that also spans Easter Holidays. 

Mark “The Bird” Fidrych was a national phenomenon thanks to a nationally televised game that he won against the Yankees. Everybody got to see why so many Tiger fans were “Bird watchers.” He was fun to watch and he was terrific. Unlike the Negro League’s great pitchers, his antics on the mound were not choreographed to entertain the paying customers. They were extensions of his offbeat personally. He won 19 games with a so-so Tiger team (a 20-game winner on a good team is outstanding) and he never made a fielding error. He appeared twice on the cover of Sports Illustrated and once on the cover of Baseball Digest.

Angel Heart has a scene where Harry Angel is unpacking his suitcase and you see a Baseball Digest magazine inside. He tells a cop that he knows Boston Red Sox slugger and ex-marine Ted Williams. Many baseball card companies, including Topps and T. Williams, issued Mark Fidrych baseball cards. He lasted only a few years in the Majors because of injuries he suffered in 1977. He pitched three games for the Tigers in ’78. His shoulder injury wasn’t diagnosed and surgery to repair it wasn’t used in baseball until he retired. He finished his career on a Boston Red Sox Minor League team and moved back to his Northboro Massachusetts birthplace where he drove a truck and lived on a farm.  

Mark “The Bird” Fidrych won the American League’s Most Valuable Player Award for 1976, his rookie year. In 1976 Mark Fuhrman was still in his rookie year as an LAPD officer trying so hard “to make the big arrest” that his supervisor noted it on his performance evaluation as a detriment to his overall performance. 

In the Murder in Greenwich scene where you see Christopher Meloni as Mark Fuhrman for the first time, you see a calendar on the wall of the probation office before his nose enters the picture. It’s a fade-in shot from the squawking bird you hear as Martha’s friend Sheila finds her body and runs to the Moxley house. It lasts only three seconds. You have to freeze the frame and blow it up five times to see that a small, fuzzy photo pasted next to the calendar under Fuhrman’s nose is a baseball player throwing a ball, but that’s what it is. You can tell by his socks and the glove on his left hand. He looks like a pitcher. In the next six seconds you get a “gotta be” reference to “Old Detroit” (the paperweights) – if you know where to look.  

Within 64-seconds of seeing Sheila and hearing the crow or raven (Edger Allen Poe, like Mark "The Bird" Fidrych, was born in Massachusetts) you see Mark Fuhrman driving his truck on the ranch he calls his “farm.”  

Sheila’s part in the movie gives you the inverted cross just before it fades into the calendar shot. Again, you have to know where to look. I looked in the Murder in Greenwich book for anything involving the name Sheila. On the second page of the Acknowledgments, I found this: “Sheila – Thanks for the pie.”

It is along the route that Sheila “Leguire” runs after discovering Martha’s body that you will see Martha sneaking out of her house and strolling back to it to the choirs of “American Pie.”  “Bye, Bye Miss American Pie. Drove my Chevy to the levee but the levee was dry. And them good ol’ boys was drinkin’ whisky and rye, singing, ‘This will be the day that I die…This will be the day that I die.’” 

Samuel Clemons got his penname Mark Twain from his days as an aspiring Mississippi River boat pilot. Settlers along the Mississippi have long used levees to keep floodwaters away from their homes when the mighty river overflows its natural banks.  

George Stark in The Dark Half is a whisky-drinking good ol’ boy from Mississippi. He wears his hair like Elvis Presley, the state’s most famous native son, and loves Elvis songs. He is playing an Elvis recording the day that he dies in a cabin he calls, “Endsville,  “where all rail service terminates.” Thad Beaumont sees him there in a dream. We don’t see Stark. We just see the Mississippi license plate on his stolen black car. We hear sparrows, a whippoorwill and a crow or raven. We hear Stark’s voice coming out of a cracked oven glowing red and we see his cowboy boots as he steps past Beaumont’s blue and white Nikes.  

Because Thad experiences these things in a dream they appear mostly as symbols. He doesn’t know that the baby bag by his feet as Stark walks by symbolize his children or the woman roped to a chair with a ceramic face like his wife’s that shatters to reveal a skull symbolizes his wife in a fragile situation. He doesn’t know that his dream is a premonition. 

The Dark Half is a nexus in movie and TV links to Fuhrman. So are Angel Heart, The Birds and celebrities who share Hitler’s birthday or Mark Fuhrman’s. Murder in Greenwich is a nexus for the birthdays, all three of the nexus movies and scores of others.  

A nexus is where things come together like cities connecting other cities by roadways, railways, waterways and airways. You know a nexus by the traffic that flows into it. Sometimes the travel lanes become congested and you have to wait for them to clear before you can enter the nexus. Sometimes you have to take a detour or make stops in other cities before you can reach your ultimate destination.  

Travel lanes between all movies that flow into Murder in Greenwich are usually composed of several links. Think of those links as labels on a map, not the roadways, railways, waterways or airways themselves. A label that says “Paris” could mean Paris, Texas. A label that says “Lebanon” could take you to a small town in Missouri. A “Detroit” label could put you on a street in New York City. If you start in the USA and the place you want to go is London in a province called Ontario, you know not to look for labels on a map of the British Isles.  

The Murder in Greenwich “map labels” are almost overwhelming in number but they are configured so compactly and so explicitly where specificity is called for that you can’t go wrong. For example, “Dead Man’s Shoe” and “Dead Woman’s Shoes” go to a lot of movies but all of them end up in Murder in Greenwich. Moreover, all of them contain rare combinations of elements that distinguish them. So, if you see those rare combinations in any movie that came a year or more before Murder in Greenwich you know where they came from.  

The Murder in Greenwich scene with Fuhrman talking to his wife on the telephone comes mostly from portions of Masque of the Red Death, The Haunted Palace and The Dark Half. To complete the connection to Masque of the Red Death you needed a late 20^th century version of a nobleman with a certain kind of beard and the late 20^th century equivalent of a nobleman’s carriage. You needed a clear reference to a plague and a short arrow (a crossbow arrow), preferably a blue one. The Haunted Palace connection required a long distance conversation between a man and his wife, the man saying that he is being treated as though he has the plague and a doctor. The Dark Half gives you everything else including the kids, the telephones, the “love yous” and the blue and white Nikes on Mark Fuhrman’s feet.  

Nike named a line of running shoes after Michael Jordan. No doubt that’s why you see the Nike “swoosh” on Fuhrman’s blue and white shoes as he says, “Honey, I’ve gotta run right now. Sorry. You gotta tell the kids I love’em. Call’em soon. And you know how much I love you.”

In dramatic hanging up the phone and running-down-the-stairs shots you see a close-up of Fuhrman’s Nikes again. Then you see him outside watching as the man from Maryland’s black car he spotted from his window peels away into the night. You hear a dog bark and you see water from a recent ran shimmering on the pavement. You get a worm’s-eye view of Fuhrman peering after the receding car as the shot fades into Fuhrman and Weeks greeting Dr. Baden though billows of steam as Baden gets off the train.   

If you weren’t comparing that sequence to a combination of scenes in the Dark Half, one showing the Nike logo on Thad Beaumont’s shoes as he nearly trips over the baby bag, all you’d see is the Michael Jordan link. But when you examine the entire 68-second sequence beginning with the Mark and Caroline’s long distance chat and ending with Michael Baden mentioning “The family doctor” you get much more. You get a mix of two scenes from the Dark Half rolled into one, with details like the waterfowl and the best selling authors, Thad Beaumont and Mark Fuhrman saying and doing similar things. Consider this Murder in Greenwich exchange between Mark and Caroline with Mark holding the receiver of a cord phone to his left ear and pacing back and fourth with the base in his right hand:  

MF: How are the kids?  

CF: They miss you crazy. 

MF: And you? 

CF: I wish you were home? How are they treating you? 

(A black car on the TV screen in MF’s room peels away into the night with screeching tires) 

MF: Like I’ve got the plague… Did I tell you Baden is coming in?

Mark draws the curtains with a rustle that sounds like bird wings flapping as Caroline queries, “Michael Baden?”   

Mark Fuhrman looks down at the cigarette-smoking man in his shiny black Mercedes Benz spotted with rainwater. Fuhrman knows he’s from Maryland because he saw his license plate earlier when he was talking with Weeks outside the bar where he first saw the man. You get a good look at Mark Fuhrman’s gold wedding band just as you do with Thad Beaumont in a similar shot.  

MF: Dorothy Moxley’s lawyer got the state attorney to open the autopsy file – Honey, I gotta run….” 

Caroline’s last word’s are, “Mark, don’t take any crap.” Mark’s last words are, “I never do.”  

I don’t have to tell you what “crap” has to do with birds. A stuffed pheasant hangs on the wall of the Beaumont’s private doctor’s office in The Dark Half. The waterfowl link in Murder in Greenwich might require some explanation if you have never lived in Michigan. 

Seven states in the Union begin with the letter “M,” Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Montana, Michigan, Main and Mississippi. A flower a bird and a slogan represent each state in the Union.  

The Murder in Greenwich phone conversation sequence connects to Michigan buy way of Dorothy Moxley. It’s no accident that the curtains make flapping bird wings sounds as Fuhrman pulls them aside and mentions Dorothy along with the autopsy report and you see wet pavement where Fuhrman is looking. Dorothy was a Michigander – a resident of “The Water, Winter Wonderland.” A gander is a waterfowl. Her husband’s lawyer brought police homicide detectives from Michigan to Greenwich in 1976. You first see the Maryland licenses plate where Fuhrman first mentions the Michigan cops in the book.  

You can make these connections if you read the book – and if you saw the pattern of “little things” Fuhrman said in Murder in Brentwood, things he noticed that connected to the Bundy killer. This sort of “detective work” is a key aspect of Fuhrman “signature.” It’s what all the great detectives do to solve crimes in the movies. But in the process of showing you how clever he was at noticing little things that everybody else missed, he tells you which movies his observations came from.  

The phone call sequence in Murder in Greenwich comes mostly from The Dark Half, set mostly in the State of Main. It connects to Mississippi by way of The Dark Half’s dream scene, the phone conversation scene and the “Endsville” scene where the man from Mississippi says, “all rail service terminates.” It connects to the arrows (sparrows), the telephones, the “miss you” talk and the screeching tires of the black car racing away. It connects to Caroline’s clothes, the couch she sits on and the cordless phone she holds to her ear in her right hand. It connects to Main and Mississippi by way of the cord phone that Mark Fuhrman holds in his left hand, the base he holds in his right hand, his pacing, his wedding ring, his shoes, his “I gotta run,” his Nikes and his kids.  

The differences are also notable, particularly with the telephones and the clothes. Mark Fuhrman is dressed for warm weather with a short sleeve top and short trousers. Thad Beaumont is dressed for cold weather with a heavy coat and long pants. Mark Fuhrman has a white phone. Thad has a black one. Caroline has a black phone. Liz has a white one. Caroline holds her cordless phone to her right ear and sits the whole time facing toward the camera. Liz holds her cordless phone in her left hand and sits briefly on the couch facing away from the camera. Liz wears a blue green sweater and brown slacks. Caroline wears a brown sweater and blue jeans.  

I could do another complete chapter on The Dark Half links to Murder in Greenwich. I won’t because, believe it or not, I have several movies to go with more links and stronger ones. I will hit some high points, though, in the next chapter with another Fuhrman favorite, Jack the Ripper.