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From: Jasper
T1: [email protected]
Category 3: Category 1
Date: 28 Feb 1999
Time: 09:08:45
Remote Name: dyn1-tnt7-50.detroit.mi.ameritech.net
You appear to be at the stage of investigating Turner where I was when I started to view Fuhrman as a real suspect. I had a bunch of stuff that said I could be right, but I had to start throwing rocks at what I had to see if it stood up. Otherwise, I would fall into the same trap the prosecution and the press did in identifying the wrong man as the killer. The more you look for something, the more of it you are likely to find. That's why I'm so confident that Fuhrman is the killer; the most compelling evidence against him came to light when I was looking for evidence to clear him (height, shoe size, alibi, light-colored SUV, partner with a smaller foot and "a deeper, older-sounding voice," etc.). I simply couldn't do it.
You wrote: 1) "Fuhrman might have been media savvy, but how could he guess the way this case would be so relentlessly exploited?" 2) "The Christian Brando case a few years before had many of the same scandalous details and involved a much hotter celebrity " 3) " yet it came and went without one of the investigators getting spotlighted." 4) "Why was Simpson such a target?"
I dealt with all of these questions at length throughout the book but you can get a pretty good overview in the Chronology, the first item in the Appendix. Here are some quick answers:
1) This isn't nearly as hard as it seems. The answer is, he wasn't guessing. The story fell into a pattern that I saw long before I started my first novel in 1991. It's all about image warfare, which is the unifying theme in all five of my books. The extent to which there was something new and sensational to report on a regular basis was the extent to which the media was bound to cover the story. As "an anonymous source close to the investigation" with connections to every bit of the "mountain of evidence" against O.J., he could play the media like a fiddle for as long as he could give them something new. 2) If his father had been accused of murdering him or his mother-or him and his mother you can bet it would have stayed hot a lot longer than it did. If he had killed a black man (racial violence sells) for beating (celebrity violence sells), raping (sex sells) and killing (murder sells) his son (celebrity tragedy sells), you tell me what the media would have done with it. 3) None of the investigators committed the murder Christian was charged with or did anything to suggest that they wanted to be in the spotlight. None of them had anything to gain. 4) Read the Chronology.
Jasper