Pinpointing the Source

RELATED LINKS:  Fuhrman and McClinton   The Gun   Hammer   Model P

The movies called up by Michael McClinton’s testimony in the 2007 Palace Station incident are the Back to the Future, trilogy with Michael J. Fox as Marty McFly. The TV shows are Vega$ with Robert Urich, Spencer for Hire with Urich as Spencer and Avery Brooks as Hawk, and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine with Brooks as the DS9 space station commander Ben Sisco. Time travel is a recurring theme in DS9. It also illustrates a recurring them in Mark Fuhrman’s high profile projects where he takes distinctive threads from several movies and TV shows and weaves them into his stories.

You don’t have to remember the whole sequence of connecting parts to understand how this works. If you studied how the killer did it on Bundy and the way Fuhrman did it in Murder in Brentwood, you know how it works. If you didn’t, all you have to know is that one movie/TV element after another that Fuhrman used to tell his stories do connect to others in ways that are uniquely significant to him.

Fuhrman doesn’t always take the main character to represent himself. Sometimes it’s the actor, a supporting character or a salient aspect of the actor who plays the supporting character. Fuhrman takes you to Star Trek in his Murder in Greenwich movie with Tommy Skakel giving Martha Moxley driving lessons and calling her “Sulu,” the Star Ship Enterprise helmsman. But it’s not Fuhrman who takes you to the big Fuhrman bell ringer in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. It’s Michael McClinton, a.k.a. “Spencer.” 

Nana Visitor as Major Kira, Sisco’s second in command at the Deep Space Nine space station has a Fuhrman 7 26 birthday bell ringer. July 26 is her birthday. 726 is the flight number of the alien space ship in The Twilight Zone episode “To Serve Man” when the To Serve Man book is decoded. The fifth item in Fuhrman’s Bundy notes is a code based on “To Serve Man. The Swiss Army watch code translation of 726 is 714.

714 is the badge number of Jack Webb’s character Joe Friday in Dragnet, a Mark II production, and Babe Ruth’s home run record that was broken by Milwaukee Brewer’s slugger Hammerin’ Hank Aaron.  Fuhrman is the only person in O.J. Simpson’s life since the “pattern of abuse” baseball bat incident letter he wrote in 1989 who unites these elements.

In Murder in Brentwood Fuhrman made a pointed reference to Joe Friday. On the cover sheet of his Bundy notes he supplies a “sloppy writing” pattern for interpreting the first thee digits of his 21464 badge number as 714. In his story about finding the matching glove of the Bundy killer with his flashlight where Kato Kaelin heard three thumps, he said that he ran into cobwebs. On page 43 Fuhrman says he checked the Rockingham house crawlspace after finding the matching glove. In “The Gun” episode of Dragnet 1967, Friday comes to a scene where a woman was killed with a .45 caliber bullet. One bullet is in the victim’s body. He enters a crawlspace with cobwebs and signals his partner that he found where to look for the matching bullet by making three thumps on the ceiling with his flashlight. He finds the bullet. His partner finds the gun that fired it.

In an episode of Dragnet 1967 called “The Hammer,” Friday and his partner Gannon investigate the death of a 62-year-old man who was bludgeoned to death with a hammer. Their investigation takes them from Los Angeles to Cottonwood AZ where codes relating to the murder of Robert C. Hurd can be found and Carson City, Nevada is highlighted in an exchange between Gannon and the killer. Michael McClinton is a former resident of Carson, CA, the city on the eastern border of Torrance. At the time of the Hurd murder, Mark Fuhrman lived in Redondo Beach, the city on the western border of Torrance. There is no letter “j” to work with in “The Hammer” codes. The only way you can make them work is to do precisely what Fuhrman did in Murder in Brentwood. You have to lower sergeant major Hurd’s Army retirement rank to master sergeant.

Fuhrman, who left the Marine Corps as a sergeant E-5 knew the difference between a master sergeant and a sergeant major. They are the same in the Army and the Marines. The highest of respect commanded by sergeant majors is also identical. Fuhrman calling the unnamed man beaten to death with a hammer a retired Army master sergeant was therefore a deliberate alteration of the truth.  In the Stanley Kubrick movie version of Stephen King’s The Shining (1980) Jack Nicolson as Jack Torrance, kills an elderly black man with an ax. In King’s novel and his 1997 mini-series teleplay, the murder victim, a master chef, is beaten to death with a croquet mallet.

In Fuhrman’s 2002 Murder in Greenwich movie he uses teenagers smashing pumpkins with baseball bats as a visual metaphor for Michal Skakel smashing Martha Moxley’s skull with a golf club. In another scene Fuhrman makes a “shocking” point about the death of Martha Moxley by calling up an image of what her head would have looked like if the killer had used a croquet mallet. A mallet, of course, is a type of hammer. In that rainy scene, the sound of thunder can be heard just before the mallet strikes the ball. In Norse mythology, the thunder god is Thor, who summons rain, lighting and thunder with his hammer and uses it in battle as a weapon.     

Fuhrman’s birthday, February 5, is the same as Hank Aaron’s. In Murder in Brentwood (page 116-117) Fuhrman challenges Gerald Uelmen’s argument that, “Keeping the issue of race out of the trial of People vs. O.J. Simpson would have been like keeping the issue of slavery out of the Civil War.”  Fuhrman countered by saying, “A better analogy would be this: Trying to keep Simpson out of the case was like trying to keep Babe Ruth out of baseball.” It’s not a better analogy. It’s not even relevant unless you are thinking of O.J. with a baseball bat and the knife that was used on Bundy like a hammer and a sword.

With Babe Ruth you get Hank Aaron, the only Hall of Fame baseball player with Mark Fuhrman’s birthday. With the Major League teams Aaron played for you get Milwaukee, Wisconsin, the city where Aaron started and finished his career and got the nickname “Hammerin’ Hank. With a hammer you get the Fuhrman-Roberts investigation of Robert C. Hurd’s murder in Las Vegas. With McClinton you get his former residence in Milwaukee as well as his residence in Las Vegas when Hurd was killed. In the Palace Station incident you get McClinton, baseballs and baseball bats signed by Hall of Fame baseball player Duke Snider. In the 22^nd Major League All Star game at Milwaukee’s County Stadium in 1955, Snyder and Aaron were on the same team.

The Milwaukee Braves played their last game at County Stadium on October 3 (10/03) 1965. O.J. Simpson was acquitted of murder on October 3, 1995. He was convicted of armed robbery and related criminal charges on October 3, 2008.

The baseball bats in the Palace Station Hotel had no personal connection to anyone in the room with O.J. other than McClinton – the man with the gun. Of the threats Hank Aaron received when he was chasing Babe Ruth’s 714 home run record was this: “My gun is watching your every move.” Hank Aaron wrote about it in his 1991 book, I Had a Hammer.

Michael McClinton had a hammer with him in Thomas Riccio’s Palace Station Hotel room. So did Walter Alexander. A hammer is a component of the .45 caliber Ruger model P345 pistol that McClinton threatened to “crack” Riccio in the head with and the .22 caliber Beretta that he gave to Alexander. The hammer component of the gun in McClinton’s hand means nothing unless he did something on his own initiative to call attention to it.

He did.