Tom Nolan

Det. Tom Nolan's name first surfaced in the June 12, 1994 double homicide case at 875 South Bundy Drive in Brentwood, CA  on February 15, 1995. It happened under the direct examination of West L.A. Homicide Coordinator Det. Ron Phillip by prosecuting attorney Marcia Clark after he said he called Mark Fuhrman on June, 13, 1994. 

Phillips' reference to what Nolan told him is hearsay. The defense should have objected and subpoenaed Nolan to hear from his own lips under sworn testimony what he told Philips. The fact that they didn't reflects a false belief on the part of the defense that Phillips and Fuhrman were partners. That's what Fuhrman testified to in the preliminary hearing. Marcia Clark did not correct it although she knew it wasn't true. She knew that Fuhrman and Roberts were partners because of the backstage drama surrounding her refusal to call Roberts as a witness to corroborate Fuhrman's most dramatic discoveries. Instead, she did everything in her power to hide that critical fact from the defense including suborning Phillips' perjured testimony that Roberts was simply "a detective" on the case and allowing his false implication to stand that Roberts and Nolan were partners.

Early in Johnnie Cochran's cross-examination of Phillips on February 16, 1995, Cochran asked him why he was at Rockingham after West L.A. had been taken off the case. Phillips said, "Because my partner, Detective Fuhrman, was still showing Vannatter and Lange certain items that he had found and we had not left the location yet from when we arrived."

Near the end of Phillips' testimony on the 16th, Cochran asked him who he called after Roberts. He said, "I believe I called Detective Nolan."

All of the attorneys as well as the judge and the police officers in court knew that LAPD detectives normally worked in pairs. With Phillips and Fuhrman established as one pair, another detective was required to explain Roberts' involvement in the case. The net effect of naming Tom Nolan as a detective slated to meet up with Roberts was not only to separate Roberts from Fuhrman in the collective mind of the defense but also to hide Roberts as a silent witness for the prosecution.

Indeed, the biggest danger to the prosecution was that the defense would call Roberts as a witness because of the reports he signed after interviewing the three witnesses in possession of Nicole's dog in an unbroken sequence after the murders. These reports supported the defense "reasonable doubt" objective of confusing the timeline for the murders and impeaching the testimony of the man who found the dog. However, the risk was minimal because the defense had everything they needed from Roberts' reports coupled with testimony from the people he and "another detective" interviewed. A bigger defense risk was for Roberts to appear as a credible witness for Fuhrman.

Only in retrospect does Tom Nolan, a detective who did "nothing," loom large as a decoy for what Fuhrman and Roberts did or could have done as a team on June 13, 1994 . Only in Fuhrman's February 16, 1997 publication of Murder in Brentwood do we get a clear picture of how he, Roberts and Phillips worked on the case as a three-man team. He does not mention Tom Nolan. He doesn't allude to him. He did mention him in his criminal trial testimony, once on March 10, 1995 and once on March 13. On the 10th he said only that Nolan was among the people waiting on the corner of Bundy and Dorothy for RHD detectives to arrive. On March 13 he had to be more specific to answer specific question put to him by defense attorney F. Lee. Bailey:

So far the only reasonable questions we can ask about Tom Nolan have to do with how and why Phillips called him, what he did, when he did it and who or what confirms it. Following up on these questions you can trace Nolan from the phone call to the police station from which he and Roberts drove the couple that found the bodies on Bundy to the Montana Street home of the man who gave them the dog that led them there. To get from the West L.A. Police Station to that address on Bundy, Roberts and Nolan had to travel northwest. Northwest is the direction that Fuhrman and Phillips had to travel to get from the police station to the murder scene. Montana is the state that borders Idaho on the west and the Dakotas on the east. Also remember that Fuhrman moved to northern Idaho, which is northwest of Mt. Rushmore in Rapid City South Dakota.

What if there was no Det. Tom Nolan? What if his name and other evidence of his existence were created to divert attention from what Fuhrman and Roberts did as a team on Bundy and Rockingham?

If this scenario sounds like the stuff of fiction there are good reasons to believe that it was taken from fiction and modified to fit a real real people in a real criminal plot. A good place to start is with Fuhrman's Murder in Brentwood claim that his incriminating words on the McKinny tapes were those of a composite character he created for a screenplay.

All of the above was to prepare you for screenshots and relevant dialogue from North by Northwest , The Resurrected and Dr. Detroit. The plot in these movies, all of which are saturated with Fuhrman bell-ringers, revolves around a man who assumes the role of another man who doesn't exist.

This fact is highlighted by the existence of an actor named Tom Nolan. Professional actors, by definition, are  impostors. Assuming the role of a real or imaginary person is what they do for a living.  The Internet Movie Database lists only one actor named Tom Nolan. He was born in 1948. However, he looked at least ten years younger than he was in 1984 when he played a Nike-wearing college student named Billy Batson in Roger Corman’s School Spirit. Tom Nolan is the “spirit” The names Billy (Mark Fuhrman’s mother is Billie) and Nike as well as ghosts are major Fuhrman bell-ringers that he brought into his 2002 Murder in Greenwich movie. In the 1937 movie Topper, Carry Grant is a ghost named George Kerby. Billie Burke is Clara Topper. In the 1954-1957 Topper TV series, Leo G. Carroll is Clara’s husband Cosmo.

In The Last of the Finest, Tom Nolan has a small but important part as a mystery man who first surfaces in the telephoto lens of LAPD officers led by Brian Dennehy (O.J.'s birthday) as Frank Daly. Bill Paxton (Morgan Earp on the Tombstone poster in Fuhrman's den) is Hojo (Howard Jones). Hojo is a member of Frank's team who sees the mystery man in a restaurant handing a thick envelope to a drug dealer. Hojo, on an LAPD flag football team sees him again playing quarterback for their DEA opponents. After the game Frank asks a friend on the DEA team who he is. His friend tells him, in effect, that he doesn't really know. He knows only that he is some kind of government undercover agent out of Washington, D.C. who goes by the name of Travers, that he played football at Army's military academy in West Point, New York and that he showed up a few days earlier. The shots of Nolan in The Last of the Finest are not as clear as they are in School Spirit but, although he is blonde in this move, the sots are clear enough to show that he is the same actor.

North by Northwest (’59)

 In North by Northwest (’59) James (Fuhrman and O.J.’s middle name) Mason is the master villain Phillip Vandamm. Carry Grant is a New York City advertising executive name Roger Thornhill. Leo G. Carroll is The Professor, the head of a covert U.S. Intelligence agency in Washington D.C. who invents an agent named George Caplan as a decoy to throw Vandamm off the trail of his real agent.

Thornhill meets a friend named Howard at a Plaza Hotel bar. Vandamm’s henchmen believe that a United States Intelligence Agency agent named George Caplan in staying in a room at the hotel.  Thornhill sits at a table with Howard and two men his friend introduces him to. He is preoccupied with the realization that he told his secretary to call his mother at her home where she was not available because she was playing bridge at her friend’s new apartment that didn’t yet have a telephone installed. While he is telling his friend why he is distracted, a hotel valet is in the bar paging “Mister George Caplan.” Thornhill raises his hand to get the valet’s attention so he can send a telegram to his mother at her friend's place. The bad guys who are watching to see if anyone answers the page naturally assume that Thornhill is Caplan.

Here, you have to use the letters “n” and “o” twice to get Tom Nolan out of Mister George Caplan. But you get the letters for “Tom” in first-to-last order before the movie even starts in the Metro Goldwyn Mayor name and Nolan in reverse order with Metro Goldwyn Mayor over the “roaring lion” logo. You get the whole Tom Nolan name again without having to use a letter twice in the “Metro Goldwyn Mayor Presents” opening credits. You get it several times in conjunction with a telephone and a phony residence as in Ron Phillips’ claim that he phoned Tom Nolan’s residence from a list and reached him there after calling other detectives who were not available.

Thornhill is kidnapped and driven in a limousine to a mansion in Glen Cove, New York belonging to a United Nations diplomat who thinks the house is locked up while he is is New York City. James Mason, as Phillip Vandamm masquerading as the diplomat, has taken over the house. He calls Thornhill “Mister Caplan.” Thornhill, says, “I’m not Caplan. My name is Thornhill.” Vandamm and his top aid Leonard (Martin Landau) are certain he is lying. They have all the hard evidence and circumstantial evidence to convince them that he is George Caplan, an agent for The Professor’s United States Intelligence Agency hot on Vandamm's trail.

To demonstrate that he has not been deceived, Vandamm goes to a desk with a telephone in the foreground where he reads from a list on a sheet of paper: “On June 16^th, you checked into the Sherwin Hotel in Pittsburg as Mr. George Caplan of Berkley California. A week later you registered at the Benjamin Franklin Hotel in Philadelphia as Mr. George Caplan of Pittsburg. August 11^th you stayed at the Statler in Boston. August 29th Mr. George Caplan of Boston registered at the Wittier in Detroit. At present you are registered in room 796 at the Plaza Hotel in New York as Mr. George Caplan of Detroit. In two days you are due at the Ambassador in Chicago. And then at the Sheridan Johnson Hotel in Rapid City, South Dakota.”

The concentration of Fuhrman bell-ringers in that tiny fraction of the movie is staggering. You get most of the American cities (including Washington D.C. by inference because the D.C.-based Intelligence Agency contrived the list). Berkley gives you the entire San Francisco Bay Area. The conjunction of Detroit and Ambassador gives you the Ambassador bridge, which links Detroit, Michigan to Winsor, Ontario. Rapid City gives you Mount Rushmore, which gives you four Presidents. Two of those Presidents, Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln, give you Tom Nolan.

Later in the movie, Thornhill escapes and goes to the Plaza Hotel room of George Caplan with his mother. He gives her a $50 bill (Ulysses Simpson Grant) to charm the key to Caplan’s room out of the desk clerk. They go to the room where they find all kinds of evidence that George Caplan exists. While they are there, one of the men who kidnapped him (Adam Williams – the first name on the Mothers poem) calls the room to see if Caplan is there. Thornhill picks up the phone against his mother’s advice. The kidnapper, who is now in the hotel to kill him, scoffs when he says, “I’m not George Caplan!”  

So, who is Tom Nolan other than an obscure actor, a name on a list in Orenthal James Simpson’s murder trial and a man with letters in his name that can be pulled from Christopher Meloni as Mark Fuhrman in Murder in Greenwich? If the Iago hypothesis is correct only Mark Fuhrman could have played the part of O.J. Simpson in the double homicide of Nicole Simpson and Ron Goldman with respect to the physical evidence that incriminated him. If the Iago hypothesis is correct someone had to masquerade as Fuhrman in Pomona, California to give him his credit card alibi. Whoever this person was could have also posed as Det. Tom Nolan. Only three people attested to the existence of Tom Nolan by name; BRAD ROBERTS, RON PHILLIPS, AND MARK FUHRMAN. If you believe you can get the letters to spell Tom Nolan out of any two or three randomly selected names, try it and see what happens.

The Resurrected ('92)

A case in point is another movie involving a man impersonating another man who doesn’t exist. It’s The Resurrected starring John Terry as private detective John March and Chris Sarandon in a duel role as Charles Ward and his 18^th century twin ancestor Joseph Curwen. If Fuhrman resurrected an old partner to pose as him using his credit card to buy gas (yes, there is a detective buying gas in The Resurrected), that man might also have posed as Det. Nolan. However, you can’t make Tom Nolan out of letters in any grouping of titles, actor and character names you see or anything they say – until the last ten minutes of the movie. 

Curwen, who died over 200 years earlier, discovered a way to be resurrected through an intricate process requiring huge amounts of blood. An unfortunate byproduct of the experimentation is the creation of man-eating monsters. Charles discovers the secret and brings Curwen back to life under the guise of a mysterious man Charles calls Dr. Ash. The “doctor” makes only a brief appearance and stays in the background. He doesn’t speak and he wears a hat, a beard and sunglasses to hide the fact that he sounds like a man from the 18^th century and looks exactly like Charles, only not as healthy. 

Curwen kills Charles and tries to pose as Charles. It works. However, his sickly appearance, archaic speech, altered personality and bizarre practices convince his wife and the detective she hired to find out what he was doing that he is insane. In the process of trying to commit him to a hospital Curwen holds a scalpel to his blonde "wife's" throat and gives Det. March a deep cut on his left hand. 

Chris Sarandon is no stranger to playing someone who was resurrected or a monster maker. In the 1980 television movie The Day Christ Died he is Jesus Christ. In the 1987 television movie Frankenstein, he is Victor Von Frankenstein. In Child's Play ('88) with Brad Dourif as serial killer Charles Lee Ray, he's a Chicago homicide detective. His character wounds Brad Dourif's character in a gun battle and follows his blood trail into a toy store. In Collision Course ('89) Sarandon is Philip Madras a Detroit crime boss. Jay Leno is s detective.  In the same year he appeared in The Resurrected, Sarandon was Abraham Lincoln in Lincoln and the War Within. From 1969 to 1973 he was Doctor. Halverson in the TV soap opera The Guiding Light.

On June 13, 1994, just before Mark Fuhrman showed Ron Phillips the bloody glove on Rockingham, Phillips called O.J. at the O’Hare Plaza Hotel in Chicago to tell him that his ex-wife had been murdered. Brad Roberts was the first detective to speak with O.J. when he returned to Rockingham with a deep cut on a finger of his left hand. Fuhrman watched from an upstairs room in O.J.'s house. O.J. was not a smooth walker. He walked with a peculiar gate because of his bad knees. Roberts told O.J. that there was a blood trail leading from the murder scene to his home.

Robbery Homicide Detectives Phil Vannatter and Tom Lange took O.J. to Parker Center in downtown L.A. where they questioned him about his Bronco, his clothes and the cuts on his finger. He had several small cuts and one deep one. O.J. said that he cut his finger in Chicago. He said he was holding a glass when he got the phone call about Nicole, crushed it in his hand in response to the shocking news and cut his finger when he was trying to clean up the glass. Keep in mind the fact that Ron Phillips identified himself to O.J. and was on the hone with him when O.J. claimed that this unlikely event occurred.  

However, the doctor who examined the deep cut said that it was consistent with a glass cut and Chicago police found blood on O.J.’s bedding and a broken glass in the sink of his hotel room. This is not evidence that O.J.’s story of accidentally cutting himself in Chicago is true. It is evidence that the large cut was made in Chicago with broken glass. 

On February 19, 1997 Primetime Live’s Dianne Sawyer played part of Lange and Vannatter’s interview with O.J. on June 13, 1994 with critiques by her guest Mark Fuhrman. When O.J. respond to Lange’s question about whether he recalled bleeding in his Bronco before his limo took him to the airport, Fuhrman commented, “O.J. Simpson made up how he bled in his Bronco just as he asked that question. You can hear it, he’s thinking right now. He knows there’s blood in the Bronco. He’s gotta figure out how it got there.”   

Martin Landau as Leonard in North by Northwest appeared with O.J. Simpson as a killer cop in No Place to Hide. (’93). Tom Nolan appeared with Cary Grant in An Affair to Remember (’56) as an uncredited 9-year-old redhead. The Prize (’63) with Leo G. Carroll and Silver Steak (’76) with Gene Wilder as George Caldwell and Stefan Gierasch as Johnson masquerading as a professor, both pay homage to North by Northwest and loop right back to the three men who gave us everything we know about Det. Tom Nolan. A 1987 episode of Murder, She Wrote presents Gierasch (Fuhrman’s birthday) as a doctor. His previous role that year in The Rosary Murders places him on location in Detroit. 

Dr. Detroit (’84) 

There is a strong historical relationship between Chicago and Detroit, especially in regard to mobsters (Al Capone/Jimmy Hoffa) and professional sports. Detroit is in Michigan. Chicago sits on the edge of Lake Michigan and Michigan Ave. is a famous Chicago thoroughfare. These relationships contribute greatly to what makes these cites loud bell-ringers for Fuhrman. 

Most of what you have to know about Tom Nolan and Dr. Detroit is in the first eight minutes of the movie. It begins with Dan Aykroyd as Assistant Professor Clifford Skidlow speed walking with a peculiar gate in Nike shoes through a park in Chicago. He walks in place for a few seconds next to a statue of Abraham Lincoln. Then he speed walks ahead to a stop light next to a stretched Lincoln limo. Inside the Lincoln is a pimp named Smooth Walker (O.J. is Jack Walker in Capricorn One) and two of his four beautiful girls. His clothing and the unusual way he walks get their attention, which comes in handy for Smooth later that day when he is forced to invent a partner to take the heat off of him.

Smooth is wearing a $50 necktie. It has the same color and sheen as the one Thornhill was wearing when he was kidnapped and Mark Fuhrman wore on June 13, 1994 at Bundy and Rockingham where O.J. left in a limo the night before fly to Chicago. Smooth is wearing that necktie when he is kidnapped and taken to Mom’s Limo Service, a front for a tough Madam called Mom. Smooth owes her money that he doesn’t have. She tells him that the only reason he still has kneecap is because he runs a class operation. She then tells him that if he gives her all of his money, his girls and everything he has she will let him live. Howard Hesseman is Smooth. In the 1984 television version of Mr. Roberts he is Doc.

Smooth has to think quickly. As Mom goes to her coffee pot, he zooms in on a June calendar on the wall that says, “Detroit Differential Company” with an address and a phone number. “Detroit” is in large red script.  “Differential Company” is in smaller black type. Below that is the company’s Lake St. address and telephone number. 

Smooth tells mom that he can’t pay her because a bad dude from Detroit has moved in on him to become his unwanted partner. Mom asks him questions about his new partner. You can see him thinking, with his sifting and riveting eyes, his facial expression, and the things on the wall that he sees as he speaks. You can hear it in his voice. Next to the calendar is a large photo of Mom in a bed with her doctors in attendance. A hand-written note on the photo says, “To Mom, Success on your colon transplant!! Your doctors....” When Smooth sees this he names his new partner “The Doctor.” Again his eyes shift and fix on the calendar. He says, “Doctor – Detroit.” He then goes to work on setting up Clifford to take over his business and buys a one-way airplane ticket out of the country.

Do you think you need a “detective” and a telephone to complete the North by Northwest/ Dr. Detroit template for Phillips’ 1995 first time mention of calling Tom Nolan on June 13, 1994? You get it in shots of Mom sitting at her desk with a telephone in the foreground and only a part of the calendar in the background. The abbreviation for Detroit and detective happens to be the same; Det. That’s what you see in a shot of Mom with her head covering the last three letters of Detroit. 

Later in the movie, as Clifford agrees to assume the role of Dr. Detroit, you get the broken glass in the hand when Mom’s henchmen tell her about word on the street that Dr. Detroit is everything Smooth said he was. She is holding a shot glass at the time and squeezes it so tightly that it shatters. A person would have to be very, very, very strong to do that with shot glass.

O.J. said he was holding a water glass when he got the news that caused him to shatter the glass in his grip.  

The curious thing about this story is not that it sounds phony but that Phillips never said a word about it.  You can’t break a glass like that soundlessly. If Phillips had said he did not hear shattering glass while he was on the phone with O.J. it would have been consistent with what appeared to be a lie on O.J.’s part. But if O.J. was telling the truth and Phillips said he didn’t hear it, O.J. would have known that he lied. Who knows where that would have led in terms of ferreting out Phillips’ other lies?  Somebody played the part of a detective on June 13, 1994 but there is no evidence that he had a name until February 15, 1995 when Phillips gave it to him in his O.J. murder trial testimony. Only Phillips, Fuhrman and Roberts referred to this detective by name. 

O.J.’s shattered glass story still sounds fishy because it occurs so often in the movies. But it stands by itself in his interview with Vannatter and Lange. The Tom Nolan story does not stand by itself. It fits a pattern of movies with the same man-who-didn’t-exist theme and names and roles switched around to give that them new angles and a fresh look. It gets worse in Dr. Detroit with Clifford on the phone in his university professor's office talking to Mom in a contrived “scary” voice. He say’s that he is calling from his care phone on I-94. Phillips said that he called Tom Nolan on his cell phone in his car on the way to the police station to meet Fuhrman. And the way he told his story Roberts was Nolan’s partner.

The last straw in Fuhrman's rekindled memory of Tom Nolan after two and a half years of forgetting him can also be found in Dr. Detroit. Clifford, posing as "The Doctor," meets Mom and her boys in a junkyard as he arranged on the phone. He wears gaudy "pimp" cloths, a wild blonde wig and a medieval gauntlet on one hand. He talks big trash in his scary voice, trying to intimidate Mom into giving up her claim on Smooth's girls. In all of this talk one name he mentions stands out: Wayne County. Detroit is in Wayne County. More importantly, the Wayne County Medical Examiner’s Office is in Detroit. 

During Dianne Sawyer's February 19, 1997 interview with Fuhrman, she asked Dr. Warner Spitz to comment on whether a Swiss Army knife could have made the deep stab wounds in Ron Goldman's body that Fuhrman said it did. Dr. Spitz confirmed that Fuhrman was right. In Fuhrman's next interview that night he told Geraldo that his partner Brad Roberts reminded him that Tom Nolan was on the case. A more likely reminder was Doctor Detroit. The most likely reminder of Doctor Detroit was  Dr. Spitz, a professor of Pathology at Wayne State University in Detroit and a professor of Toxicology at the University of Windsor in Windsor, Ontario. From 1972 to 1988 Dr. Spitz was the Chief Medial Examiner of Wayne County, Michigan. --Jasper