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Chapter 29

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Chapter 28

Staying on Track

I started the last chapter with the idea of railroad tracks as a metaphor and ended with a blood link to a trailer for The Player. My intent was to make a long "train" of railroad links from one movie to the next. I don’t want to say I got "sidetracked" but the process of getting there did take on a life of its own. Train…railroad…sidetracked. You see the problem. One idea leads to a related idea automatically unless something else pushes your thinking in another direction. Ironically, that’s the point I wanted to make with a blood link between Bill Murray and his brother Brian in Groundhog Day. Once you start rolling down any track you have to go where the tracks go. You, me, the Bundy killer, anybody.

I had planed to follow the "Brian" name link from Groundhog Day to "Brian" in the "Read the Mind…See the Movie" episode of Moonlighting and then to hop on "The Murder Train" in Moonlighting’s "Next Stop Murder." I was going to show the train links in The St. Valentines

Day Massacre, The Verdict, Special Bulletin, Prey of the Chameleon and Ghost, and end with a slew of links to the Bundy murders in Murder on the Orient Express. I also wanted to show how the shot of the Ford Bronco going down the railroad tracks in The Gun in Betty Lou’s Handbag with Penelope Ann Miller linked up to Rick Aviles (Sam’s killer in Ghost) and Shawn Penn (We’re No Angels) in Carlito’s Way. But that would have taken two or three more chapters.

Though all of those links connect at various points, once I started with Suspect, it was no longer up to me to decide the order or the means by which the killer switched tracks in his thinking. Michael Beach, the parking lot attendant was a link to "Gunfight at the So-So Corral" that I thought would make the Groundhog Day connection and take me directly to "Next Stop Murder (you’ll see why shortly). But when David Addison mentions Eddie Murphy, Bill Murray and Jessica Lange I had to see whether or not there were significant links of any kind to the Bundy murders in a Jessica Lange movie.

To make a logical transition I needed an example of "railroading" that was purely metaphorical (no actual railroads were involved in the Bundy murders). It had to involve David Addison’s imitation of Rod Serling, something about Lange or her character that applied to Nicole Brown Simpson, and the key to the maid’s room in Fuhrman’s imagination. That, of course, was the door in The Twilight Zone that introduces "Number 12 Looks Just Like You." Had I followed the parking lot link in Suspect to Addison’s idea about a "beach movie" and gone from there to his other great ideas it would have probably led straight to The Player. That’s because he comes up with the idea in "Gunfight at the So-So Corral" with Tim Robbins as the killer who gets off the bus from Detroit.

David’s first "new idea" is for a TV series called Bus Station starring the crew of The Love Boat. He genuinely thinks it's an original idea even as he sings a slight variation of the Love Boat theme song. He can’t see why Maddie isn’t as excited about it as he is. Parking Lot is his second new idea. It’s a movie, not a TV series, and the setting is different but the story—and the theme song are essentially the same. His third idea is the one I thought I could use for the railroad link with a stop on the way at the subway sign promoting the musical Cats in Ghost. He begins his pitch to Maddie by telling her it’s a musical. He starts, she finishes. He asks her to guess what it’s called. She does, as I’m sure you have, too. It’s called Train Station.

You can see how that progression of ideas feeds into The Player, but it leaves Jessica Lange in limbo when we move away from David’s Parking Lot pitch. That, we can’t do with Lange, a blonde female who looked so much like Nicole did in the early ’90s. We have to see what’s there because of Fuhrman’s personal involvement with Nicole and the critical importance that parking spots played in his investigation and analysis of her death

Fuhrman's exaggeration of the way O.J.’s Bronco was parked helped tell his story of O.J.’s panicky flight from Bundy and

the blood trail to the maid’s room. A dime and a penny (11 cents) near Nicole’s Jeep Cherokee in a parking spot behind her garage appears in different places in two police photos. A dime on one of the tire tracks shows that the Jeep was moved. Det. Tom Lange reported seeing two dimes and two pennies. Jessica Lange had to mean something to the killer and the same thing to Fuhrman. Cape Fear answers all of those demands, right down to Lange’s black clothes, her bare feet, her cigarettes and her thumb ring – not to mention the Jeep Cherokee she drives and the bleeding killer in the parking lot scene and under her jeep.

Remind you of O.J. under the red Ford truck and the bus bound for Detroit in The Naked Gun 2 ½? Addison Powell is a Detroit parish priest in The Rosary Murders. Robert Redford gets him killed in Three Days of the Condor and Redford kills a woman on a bus in The Twilight Zone.

I couldn’t address the issue of Lange’s relevance to the Bundy killer’s thinking without addressing the inevitable objections to the kind of knit cap Michael Beach wears in Suspect. You saw how that got us here through David Addison’s pitch for a "beach movie" in "Gunfight at the So-So Corral" and his interpretation of The Twilight Zone introduction in "Read the Mind…See the Movie." Now that we’re here, let's look at another Twilight Zone route we could have taken with names and initials.

Six months after Bruce Willis hit the big time with his starring role in Moonlighting, he starred in "Shatterday," episode one of The New Twilight Zone series, as an unscrupulous, egocentric ad exec named Peter J. Novis. Assuming that the J stands for James (as in Willis’ character in Mortal Thoughts) you have all of the letters you need in that name to spell O.J. Simpson. Assuming that it doesn’t, you can borrow the "m" in good conscience from another Twilight Zone classic.

"Shatterday" is a twist on a 1960 episode of Twilight Zone called "Mirror Image." "Mirror Image" is about a woman in a bus station who sees in a bathroom mirror her doppelganger through a crack in the door sitting in the waiting room. It stars Vera Miles as Millicent Barnes, the woman who sees her evil twin from another dimension in the mirror, and native Detroiter Martin Milner ("Pete" in Adam 12) as a traveler who befriends her. The bus station has no maid, but it does have a cleaning lady.

In "Shatterday," the roles are reversed. The victim of the body takeover is a man (Bruce Willis) and he represents the evil spirit that the good double is trying to replace. Like Dr. Matt Binnell and his double in Invasion of the Body Snatchers, or Fuhrman and O.J. in the Bundy murder case, the assent of one must come at the decline of the other until only one of the players is left in the game. With Fuhrman and O.J. it was necessary only for the "double" to walk in a dead woman’s shoes (Nicole’s Bruno Magli brand) to give the literal and figurative impression that his actions were those of O.J. Simpson.

So, what do we have here that connects to Fuhrman’s picture of Simpson and a dead woman’s shoes? I mean, besides the split personality, the mirror and the MB initials? Where are the BM initials? Where are the shoes? Where is the maid? If you saw A House in the Hills (’93) with Michael Madsen as Mickey, and Helen Slater as Alex, you may have flashed on Slater as the housesitter opening the door for Mickey. If so, the reason is more than Mickey mistaking her for the lady of the house and her saying, "Who did you think I was, the maid?" It’s more than Mickey replying, "Not dressed like that." It’s more than seeing Alex posing in a mirror or protecting herself with a butcher knife. But those things get us close.

Using his uniform and his bogus story as a key to getting in the door, Mickey goes to the basement. While he’s there, Helen looks in the mirror, poses as a character she has auditioned to play in a soap opera and makes a speech about being "wounded." It’s shortly after that that she runs to the kitchen, like Helen in Candyman, to get the butcher knife.

Recalling that Candyman (’92) features Michael Madsen’s sister Virginia as Helen in the kitchen scene, where she defends herself with a knife against her forbidden lover from another life, may give you an answer. The same thing happens in A House in the Hills (’93) with Helen Slater as Alex. Later on a man calling himself "Willie" uses false pretenses to get into the house where Mickey is holding Alex hostage. Alex introduces Mickey to Willie as her brother. When you see Michael Madsen and Helen Slater in a sex scene you know that you have found the master link in the Fuhrman collection’s web of incest links and blood links. That sequence leads to a scene where candles are burning, romantic music is playing and Mickey is telling Alex about a pizza place where his murdered brother used to play the song, "I Can’t Let You Go" over and over. That’s right, pizza, as in the pizza that Virginia Madsen as Anne orders for herself and Bruce Willis as David in the 1989 Moonlighting episode "When Girls Collide."

Now you know all six reasons why Fuhrman found the butcher knife on the counter in Nicole’s kitchen so irresistible to wrap "his" story around and nine reasons why the California pizza kitchen was so important to him. Between Michael and Virginia Madsen you have the blood link in Fuhrman’s story of Nicole arming herself against an oddly dressed O.J. (Mickey stands at the door in an exterminator outfit with a mask around his neck) and O.J. having the key to "the maid’s door." Mickey’s key to the "maid’s" door is a line of bullshit. So was Mark Fuhrman’s.

If you’re wondering how A House in the Hills got inserted in a chain of Twilight Zone links between Moonlighting and The Player, hang on. We really haven’t left The New Twilight Zone. We’re just putting it in context with the door to the maid’s room, the mirror, the wounded killer, the evil self that O.J. was supposed to have seen in the mirror, the butcher knife in the kitchen, the pizza and the bloody shoeprints.

A House in the Hills gives us not only a bleeding killer, but his bloody shoeprints on the crime scene. It gives us the glasses of a murder victim who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time and bloody hands in place of the bloody gloves. It also gives us what the blue knit cap did to identify O.J. Simpson as the killer—a killer with missing hair. We get all of that and more with Jeffrey Tambor as Willie (notice how close Willie is to Willis) in one film. Willie is a madman who drowns a woman in her swimming pool in a case of mistaken identity. His target was the married woman next door, where Alex is housesitting, who is having affairs with cops. He comes back to kill her when he realizes his mistake but, through a series of misadventures, he gets shot in the foot by another killer in the basement and leaves the bloody imprints of his Nike running shoes on the floor.

Notice how close Nike is to Nikki. Nicole was a runner. The actor plying the killer in the basement is James (O.J.) Laurenson. Notice how close that is to Lorenzo. What are the odds that Mark Fuhrman didn’t notice?

Tambor is the husband who kills his wife in The New Twilight Zone’s "Dead Woman’s Shoes," which aired on 11/22/85 (that’s right, 11/22) The Bundy killer could have gotten the Bruno Magli Lorenzos no later than 1992. Therefore, the decision to wear them to frame O.J., if circumstances allowed, must have been made before A House in the Hills was released. Several aspects of the crime scene and Fuhrman’s interpretation of the evidence says he saw the movie between 11/22/’85 and 6/12/’94, not the least of which is the position of Nicole’s body in the pool of blood. You see blonde-haired Helen Slater in a short, black dress resting in a similar pose. Normally you don’t count the names of minor crewmembers, but in this move you can’t ignore someone on the swing gang (whatever that is) named Bruno Moes.

Helen Mirren stars with Jeffrey Tambor in "Dead Woman’s Shoes." You may remember Mirren as London police Inspector

Jane Tennison in the 1992 BBC/PBS mini series Prime Suspect. It’s an English version of Mark Fuhrman and Laura Hart McKinney’s Men Against Women, with Mirren playing the part that Fuhrman said he created for "his" screenplay. In the second of two story lines she has a black lover, a killer wraps his victim in plastic sheeting and an innocent prisoner hangs himself. In the first, the prime suspect, George Arthur Marlo, claims that his car was stolen. His girlfriend says, "They’re gonna get you because of that bloody car. And they can plant evidence. And they’re out to get you." Tennison’s rout to the "bloody car" goes from a parking lot, to a train station and then to a bus station. She gets the case when the lead detective drops dead of a heart attack. His partner says she likes wearing dead men’s shoes.

In The New Twilight Zone’s "Dead Woman’s Shoes" Mirren is Betty, a meek salesclerk in a secondhand store who tries on a pair of expensive shoes and becomes Mrs. Montgomery, the wealthy, recently murdered owner of the shoes. Combining the first name of one personality and the last name of the other gives you BM. Betty, possessed by Mrs. Montgomery, nearly kills Mr. Montgomery (Jeffrey Tambor) and nearly dies before ditching the dead woman’s shoes and becoming herself again. So, where’s the maid? The maid, a black woman, finds the shoes, puts them on, becomes the other woman and commits the murder.

If you must have a 6’ 2" black man in a dead woman’s shoes to see how the Bundy killer could have associated O.J. with Nicole’s Bruno Maglis, Jeffery Tambor can get you there, too. He’s Jay Porter in Norman Jewison’s And Justice for All (’79) with Robert Christian as Ralph Agee. You see Agee’s shoes in a parking lot as he exits a Baltimore Maryland police car wearing a dress, a sweater and a blonde wig. He walks with his toes pointed straight ahead and uses the n-word a lot. He’s a first time offender who gets a favorable probation report that will keep him from having to go to jail. The judge gets the wrong report so his attorney Arthur Kirkland (Al Pachino) gets the corrected one for the judge on Agee’s court date. Unfortunately, Jay (Jeffrey Tambor) starts pitching china plates down a courthouse hallway around that time. Arthur goes with him to the hospital and asks Warren, another lawyer, to give the judge the corrected report. Warren shows up late, forgets the report and the judge sentences Agee to five years in prison. A half-hour later Agee hangs himself.

Perhaps the name Warren associated with a dead man’s woman’s shoes stuck a familiar note. "Dead Woman’s Shoes" is a remake of Charles Beaumont’s "Dead Man’s Shoes" starring Warren Stevens. This episode of The Twilight Zone aired in 1962 with Stevens as a derelict who gets possessed by the spirit of a dead man when he takes the shoes off of the man’s feet and puts them on his. More about Warren Stevens later….

I’m sure you noticed how easily the roles of men and women can be switched in telling essentially the same story. That’s what James Crocker does in his 1985 remake of Beaumont’s "Shadow Play." Adam Grant, the condemned prisoner in the dream he can’t wake up from, is still a man, but it becomes obvious in the end that people outside of death row, including the victim could be male or female. But if you throw in Julia Roberts’ role as a woman on death row in The Player with Bruce Willis as the district attorney who sentences her to death, anything goes.

It seems likely to me that Martin Scorsese had both versions of "Shadow Play" in mind as well as O.J.’s ’89 fight with Nicole when he made his ’91 version of Cape Fear. Scorsese’s Cape Fear has three of the principle players from the ’62 version. Robert Mitchum is Max Cady in the original and a cop in the remake. Gregory Peck is Sam Bowden in the original and Max Cady’s lawyer in the remake. Martin Balsam is the judge who rules in Cady’s favor in the remake. In the original he is Police Chief Mark Dutton. The fight scene between Leigh (Jessica Lange) and Sam (Nick Nolte) are two close to O.J. and Nicole to be purely coincidental.

It was no secret that O.J. didn’t like Nicole smoking in the house, or that the ’89

fight started in their bedroom over a pair of earrings that Nicole thought O.J. gave to another woman she assumed he was having sex with. In Scorsese’s Cape Fear Leigh (Jessica Lange) physically attacks Sam (Nick Nolte) in their bedroom over an affair she thinks he’s having with a girl named Lori (in the original, Lori is the Bowden’s daughter). The fight continues on a verbal level while Leigh puffs on a cigarette and takes off her earrings.

What tells me that the scene was probably borrowed from O.J. and Nicole’s ’89 fight is what follows Sam’s well-reasoned pitch for sticking together. He makes the case that Cady understood the legal system well enough to create the circumstances that would "drive a wedge" between them. The next thing you know, he’s sleeping on the couch. I came away with the feeling that someone involved in putting that fight scene together did, in fact, model it after the news story of O.J. and Nicole with a decided lean toward O.J.’s version of what happened. Moreover, I got the feeling that whoever that person was suspected when Cape Fear ’91 was on the drawing boards that someone was out to harm O.J.’s family. I’ll leave that up to someone else to look into, but from the experience I’ve had with the movies in the Fuhrman collection I know that I’m not sticking my neck out too far. I know that Fuhrman was not alone in borrowing his ideas from the movies or in mixing the movies with real life. If you dig deep enough I’m sure that you will find the connection.

The first place I’d look would be in the pitch someone had to give to someone else to sell the idea of making the film. There had to be a pitch. That’s the link that joins all of the screenplays, teleplays and the musicals in the Fuhrman collection. Take, for instance, three kinds of pitches And Justice for All has to offer. Jeffrey Tambor as Jay shows us the kind we saw with the baseball pitchers real and imagined from Mark Fidrych and Mark Thurmond Phil Vannatter and Mo Vaughn (Charlie Sheen). In the mezzanine-overlooking- the- courtroom scene, Craig T. Nelson as an ambitious prosecutor prosecuting the hated Judge Fleming (John Forsythe) for a savage beating and rape, makes an off-the-record pitch to Fleming’s attorney Arthur Kirkland (Al Pachino) to throw the case. Arthur despises Fleming and everyone knows that he was forced to defend the judge for political reasons, so the prosecutor has good reason to think he has a shot. He uses a Super Bowl analogy with himself as the winning quarterback. The pitch he makes to the jury is long on emotion and short on substance with the victim as the only witness.

Most people would not have expected to see John Forsythe as Judge Fleming—a man who could beat a woman, rape her, and be so arrogant as to think he could get away with it simply because of who he was. Before and during the release of And Justice for All, he was the unseen voice of Charlie Townsend, the head of a LA detective agency in the TV series Charlie’s Angels (1976-1981). John Forsythe was a big enough star before the first airing of the show for most people to picture him without seeing his face. The man they pictured was a good guy. Farrah Fawcett, the spouse-abuse victim in The Burning Bed, was Jill Monroe, one of the original three angels. Cheryl Ladd, time traveler Louise Baltimore in Millennium, was angel Kris Monroe.

You learn what kind of judge Fleming is early in the movie when attorney Arthur Kirkland gets out of jail for taking a swing at him. Arthur acted out of frustration after putting together a case that proves his client, Jeff (Thomas Waits), who has been in jail for over a year, was innocent of the original charge and framed for a jailhouse stabbing with a knife belonging to someone else tossed into Jeff’s cell. The judge refused to look at the evidence and no argument he could present was good enough. Even while the judge is awaiting trial for the rape and beating he says—at first—that he did not commit, he has no sympathy for the innocent man in prison that Arthur is trying to get a new trial for.

All Arthur is asking is that he be allowed to make his case to a jury. But when he makes his final pitch to the judge, while Fleming is enjoying a swim in his pool, the most Fleming will say is that he will think about it. He then launches into a diatribe about the need for disproportionate punishment. His speech ignores the fact that Arthur has proof that Jeff was railroaded by lazy cops and a public defender who didn’t believe him and didn’t bother to check his story (Mike Farrell, Howard Weisman and the ’89 incident). When Fleming says, "Do you really think sending Johnny Cash to prison to sing railroad songs ever rehabilitated anyone?" Arthur knows that his arguments have fallen on deaf ears. In the next scene, his client takes prisoners after being raped and beaten and the riot squad shoots him to death.

I know that you picked up on the name link between Jeffrey Tambor, as Willie the bleeding killer with the bloody shoes in A House in the Hills, and the Jeff played by Thomas Waits in And Justice for All. That’s just for starters. The fact that he is the one who gets railroaded with a planted knife is central to the police career of Mark Fuhrman with respect to his job as a member of the gang/narcotics squad. Fuhrman was working in that unit in 1987 when he shot an armed robber named Joseph Britton five times and planted a knife next to him. Thomas Waits is as a gang member in The Warriors (’79). His gang gets framed for murder by a rival gang leader (native Detroiter David Patrick Kelly—the killer on the President’s train in Dreamscape with Dennis Quade as Alex) who shoots a charismatic gang leader and points the finger of guilt at the Warriors. Waits is the innocent Warrior who gets run over by a subway train in a scuffle with a New York City cop.

Michael Beck plays Swan, the Warriors’ leader who disarms the killer with a knife in a showdown on a Coney Island beach. Michael Beck, whose birthday is February 4, has been quoted as saying that The Warriors opened a lot of doors for him and the musical Xanadu (’80), closed them. The Warriors insignia is a death’s head with wings.

Death’s head = death. Wings could equal angels, though the Warriors were no angels. Neither were Charlie’s Angels. But Death in the Bible is an Angel. Death is also an angel in The Twilight Zone, an angel possessed of certain characteristics or involved in certain circumstances that could remind you of Fuhrman’s involvement in the Bundy murders.

We know that Fuhrman took meticulous notes at the Bundy murder scene. We know that he had a special interest in eight-year-old Sydney. He arranged evidence like the cap, the gloves and the blood in such a way that others who followed his lead would think that his ideas about the killer were theirs. He literally made a point of associating himself with the killer’s bloody gloves (Nicole purchased a pair just like them from a department store in New York), the dead woman’s car and the 22 cents next to her car that turned into 11 cents in a subsequent photo.

"One for the Angels" gives us a pitch that death makes to a pitchman to make him think that he’s the one making the pitch. According to that 1959 episode of The Twilight Zone Death is a reasonable guy. He takes meticulous notes and he can be persuaded to bend the rules from time to time. Lou Bookman is a sidewalk vendor whose time is almost up. He plans to have ice cream with the neighborhood children later that evening. Death calls on him prior to his "time of departure" and grants him his wish to make one really big pitch before he goes. Bookman promptly vows never to make another pitch, whereupon Death arranges for an eight-year-old girl to get hit by a car and die in his place at his appointed time.

Desperate to save the little girl, Bookman sets up his folding stand and makes a final pitch. It’s late at night and no one is there to sell to but Death himself. Bookman makes the finest pitch of his life, persuading death to buy everything from neckties to spools of thread until the time to take the girl passes and Death is forced to take Bookman instead. As they walk away, the smile on Death’s face reminds you that he is an angel and tells you that the whole thing was a setup from the beginning to give Bookman a chance to realize his fondest dream.

Death is also a good guy and a trickster in The Twilight Zone episode "Nothing in the Dark" posing as a wounded policeman to get an old woman to open her door for him. You have to admit that it’s a good trick. I mean, who would expect to see death in a police officer’s uniform with his blue cap next to his body and a bloody glove on his hand looking like the victim of a gunshot wound? The number on his collar is 12 (as in the size on the killer’s shoes, the month Nicole bought the gloves and the day the man who wore them killed her). The very concept of Death shedding his own blood would throw anybody. Outwardly he always looks different so the old woman can never be absolutely sure if she’s seeing him. As the wounded cop he looks like Robert Redford. The old woman saw him for the first time on a bus as another young man when he sat next to another old woman knitting socks. When he got off the bus the woman was dead.

Death in another Twilight Zone episode, "The Hitchhiker" follows Nan Adams, a buyer in a New York City department store across country en route to Los Angeles. "The Hitchhiker" premiered on January 22,1960. It begins on highway 11 in Pennsylvania after an apparent near accident. This is where Nan first sees the hitchhiker and where the official records say she died. But she doesn’t know yet that death is playing with time to give her a chance to pick him up on her own. Only when she sees him beckoning to cross a railroad track where she stalls and nearly gets hit by a speeding train does she know that he intends for her to die.

Inger Stevens is Nan Adams. When you heard Nicoles voice on the 1993 tape, you may have pictured Inger Stevens as the ghost in "The Hitchhiker" making a desperate call to her mother mother after her death in a car rash. District Attorney Gill Garcetti and Assistant District Attorney Marcia Clark went all out with the idea of Nicole speaking from the grave with that tap and one made in 1989 by an unidentified caller. The ’93 call is Nicole’s only 911 call on record. There is no record of who made the ’89 call, only an assumption by the operator and the lead responding officer that it was Nicole.

Keeping in mind the dime and penny photographed next to Nicole’s Jeep, it is worth remembering that to “drop a dime” on someone is an old expression meaning to make a telephone call, usually an accusatory one. It comes from the slot in a pay phone where the caller had to drop a dime to make a call. J. C. Penny is, of course, a department store. The only thing that documents the claim that Nicole “dropped a dime” on O.J. to 911 numerous times is Fuhrman’s 1989 letter to the city attorney.

Inger Stevens lived one year longer than Nicole’s did. She died of a drug overdose in 1970. She appeared with Martin Milner in one episode of the Robert Altman television series Route 66 and in an episode of Adventures in Paradise called Angel of Death.

Mark Fuhrman would have taken a strong interest in Inger Stevens at an early age because of his violent hatred of mixed couples, his sensitivity to his M.F. initials and her starring role in a 1959 movie where she is the last woman on Earth. The movie is The World, the Flesh and the Devil. She’s Sarah. Two men are left on Earth. One of them is a black man (Harry Belafonte) name Ralph (the same as Fuhrman’s father). The other is a white man (Mel Ferrer) named Benson. In The New Interns Inger Stevens is Nancy Turman. In the episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents (’55) called "My Brother, Richard" she’s Laura Ross. In another Twilight Zone episode she’s the daughter of an inventor whose androids are starting to annoy her. Her birthday in that episode called "The Lateness of the Hour" is a big issue with her. It turns out that she is an android, too. Her real birthday is October 18, the same as Sydney Simpson’s.

In the ’85 episode of Moonlighting called "Brother Can You Spare a Blonde," David Addison’s brother Richard travels from Pennsylvania to LA to see David. David calls him "…my parent’s science experiment." He says, "He’s one of those guys got an angle on everything. The "angle" that brings him to LA has to do with his car where Ed O’Ross as a drug dealer named Naverone hides a hundred thousand dollars while in flight from police. As Richard opens the suitcase with the cash, the sound track plays "For the Love of Money" by the O.J.’s.

In the next scene David and Maddie are trying to be the 22^nd caller to a radio station to win a cash prize. They need it to save Maddie’s house from the IRS. Maddie says that she worked 11 years for the house. David borrows the money from Richard only to be harassed by Navarone who thinks he’s Richard. When forced to confess where the money came from, Richard says, "It was weird—like The Twilight Zone."

David makes a wisecrack at an expensive restaurant that may remind you of Helen Mirren. He says to the waiter, "Take this man back to the kitchen; he’s not completely cooked." Helen Mirren is Georgina in The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover (’89). Georgina’s husband gormandizes at an expensive restaurant and delights in humiliating her. In a memorable scene where Georgia performs oral sex on a man from the restaurant (the ’92 incident with Nicole and the manager of the Mezzaluna restaurant that O.J. was ranting about in ’93 on the 911 tape) the insanely jealous husband almost catches them. He makes a loud reference to her sexual organs and says that he owns them (Denise Brown’s story of O.J. and Nicole). When he does catch them he kills the man by shoving pages from his favorite book down his throat. Georgina discovers the body and talks the cook into baking her dead lover. She forces her husband at gunpoint to eat his cooked flesh.

Seeing Ed O’Ross in "Brother Can You Spare a Blonde" could remind you of him in Action Jackson with Carl Withers as Jackson, Vanity as Sydney, Sharon Stone as Patrice, and Craig T. Nelson as the murderous automaker Peter Dellaplane. O’Ross’ character gets burned alive as he falls several stories into the center of an outdoor café. You know that Dellaplane frames Jackson for Patrice’s murder. But did you know that the actor listed in the credits as the assassin who was going to dress like Jackson to frame him for another high-profile murder is Bob Minor? Withers also gets framed in Fortune Dane (’86) where the killer wears dark brown leather gloves and leaves behind his glasses, his hat and a male and female victim. He puts a suitcase full of drug money in a bus station locker— # 32. Withers walks like the man who left the bloody shoeprints on Bundy, with his toes pointed straight ahead.

Sonny Landham, a drug dealer in Action Jackson, is the professional killer in Fortune Dane who leaves behind the cap, the glasses and the two bodies, and delivers his client’s drug money to the bus station locker. His client is a big-time criminal called Dexter. Dexter is Peter Donat.

This is where we hop aboard the "Murder Train" in "Next Stop Murder" the fifth show of Moonlighting’s first season. The Murder Train is a passenger train owned by mystery writer J.B. Harlan, who created a phenomenally successful super sleuth called Inspector Donat. David Addison calls him "Inspector Donut." Rick Jason, Vic Morrow’s lieutenant in Combat, is J.B. Every year he invites the winner of an essay contest to join four of his closest "friends" on a 24-hour train ride during which he stages a murder that his guests try to solve. When Ms. DiPesto receives a letter from him. she is so shocked that she lets out a scream. All she can do is stare at the envelope. Maddie asks her what’s inside. She says, "I don’t know." David says, "Just a shot in the dark here, but I bet opening that envelope will tell you tons."

Consider the envelope left on the Bundy murder scene a few inches away from the bloody Aris glove. The fact that it contained Juditha Brown’s glasses was crucial to the idea the killer had to plant of Ron Goldman dropping by at the last minute to deliver them. To make that story work, the killer had to open the envelope to be sure that the glasses were really there. The envelope was opened. A blood smear was on the lens.

The glasses told the story that had to be told to explain the death struggle in a way that was consistent with Mark Fuhrman, Denise Brown, Ron Shipp and Faye Resnick’s image of O.J. as the killer. It’s a modified version of "The Lady in the Iron Mask," the Moonlighting episode that followed "Brother Can You Spare a Blonde?" The "lady" is really a man wearing his wife’s clothes to set up his wife’s jealous lover who lay in wait for her on her wedding day and disfigured her by throwing acid in her face. She has worn a black mask for the last 12 years. It may not be necessary to say more about the shoes or the blue knit cap that Fuhrman called a black ski mask. But it is necessary to mention them to remind you of Helen Mirren and Warren Stevens who will have the final word in this chapter.

Meanwhile, back to the Murder Train….

Ms. DiPesto opens the envelope and learns that she’s the winner. David and Maddie take her to Union Station and go onboard to look around. David says, "I bet the whole damn train goes condo in a year."

Maddie has a date for the night and didn’t want to get on the train. David talked her into it. He shows his envy towards her date when he cracks, "Let me guess…This guy to you fifth row center tickets for Cats." You remember O.J. singing a song from the musical at his trial and Sam Wheat, the lead ghost in Ghost, running past the poster for Cats after mastering the secret of making physical objects move. Remember the train where he saw his first demonstration of a ghost willfully moving physical objects? It had a white J in a red circle. You don’t have to look too hard to see it as an O and a J. Vincent Schiavelli, the ghost on that train who walks through Willie (the-killer) Lopez (Rick Aviles) to get to Sam, is Rodney in "Next stop Murder." Rodney is J.B.’s technical advisor.

When J.B. ends up dead from a knife wound in Ms. DiPesto’s quarters. Rodney—the killer—shines a light from his penlight into his eyes. He then suggests that J.B.’s guest try to solve the murder. The guests include Janet, J.B.’s one-time fiancée and a cook. Janet says, "…Aren’t we giving the killer a break here? I mean, how are we possibly going to find the murderer if he or she is free to tamper with the evidence or change the clues?" Maddie agrees. "…You’re all mystery experts. Whoever did it is going to have a dandy time watching the rest of you race down blind alleys." Rodney transfers Ms. DiPesto’s fingerprints to the knife, but David thwarts the frame-up with a bluff that pays off.

The dead woman’s shoes and the knife were supposed to incriminate O.J. because of a movie he made in which he played a Navy SEAL and the knife he purchased during the filming. Many people thought that the similarities between the movie and the killings were too great to be coincidental. That movie bore the same title as the one that launched the career of Warren Stevens—who wore the dead man’s shoes in the original Twilight Zone before Helen Mirren wore them in Prime Suspect. It didn’t hurt that he was a Navy veteran or that one of his friends was Gregory Peck. The title of Stevens’ first movie and O.J.’s last? Frogmen.