It took longer than I’d like to admit for me to see that the silver screen’s doctors were woven as tightly into the fabric of the Bundy killings as the nurses. That probably has something to do with the cat-eyed nurse in Rod Serling’s 1962 teleplay "Twenty Two," the sound of her rubber-soled shoes on the hospital tiles and the various things she symbolized from innocent victim to angel of death. You see Bennett Cerf’s name in the end credits as the person whose antidote "Twenty Two" was based on. But once you know how much Serling liked to sprinkle his Twilight Zone episodes with inside jokes you may begin to wonder if the name "Twenty Two," along with Liz Powell’s reference to "stiffs" was a sly jab at Cerf for a $50 bet he lost to Theodore Geisel.

Geisel is better known as Dr. Seuss, the writer and illustrator of the children’s books The Cat in the Hat (1955), How the Grinch Stole Christmas (1957), and Green Eggs and Ham (1960). He was also a writer in the Army Signal Corps during World War Two. He served under Frank Capra, the producer director and co-writer of It’s a Wonderful Life (1946). Bennett Cerf bet Dr. Seuss that he couldn’t write a book using only 50 words. The book that lost him the bet was the enormously successful Green Eggs and Ham.

So, how in the world does that equate to a "sly jab at Cerf" in the title of Rod Serling’s "Twenty Two" and Liz Powell telling Barney and the Doctor about the room where they keep the stiffs?

Bennett Cerf made the bet because of what Dr. Seuss did with The Cat in the Hat when his publisher asked him to write a children’s book using only 250 words. Dr. Seuss did it with 220. All Serling had to do to remind everyone of the bet who knew about it, and to give himself plausible deniability, was to drop the zero. Its absences makes it bigger. Zero is what Bennett Cerf paid Dr. Seuss for winning the bet. You got it—Cerf stiffed him.

I didn’t know about the Serling-Cerf-Sues-Cat in the Hat links to "Twenty Two" until I started tracing "doc" links to O.J. in the movies. But I am sure Mark Fuhrman knew because of how I found the links.

I started with Dean Jagger in The Brotherhood of the Bell. The issue Fuhrman made of Nicole’s otherwise irrelevant pizza menu, told me how important it was to him. And the movie link to Back to the Future III told me that it represented a tombstone. Three things normally found on a tombstone are the name of the deceased, his or her date of birth and date of death. Jagger died on Mark Fuhrman’s 39^th birthday, February 5 1991. Perhaps you notice how little it takes to turn Jagger into jaguar—as in the spotted cat that stalks and kills from ambush? I didn’t until I saw the scene in The Brotherhood of the Bell, where Dean Jagger is shooting skeet and telling Glenn Ford that his good life of the past twenty-two years is over. Jagger is wearing a hat.

Jagger. Jaguar. A cat in a hat. Dr. Seuss. The Cat in the Hat. 220 words.

The "Twenty Two episode of The Twilight Zone is loaded with symbols that had multiple meanings for the writer and the Bundy Drive killer. As soon as I saw pier 32 as a dock in The Naked Gun as well as the doctor attempting to smother O.J. (the way Shakespeare’s Othello smothered Desdemona) I saw the whole picture. I saw a "surgeon’s cap" on O.J.’s head (a skull bandage) instead of the doctor’s and I saw that doctors in moves like Tarzan and the Leopard Woman, The Brotherhood of the Bell (a psychiatrist) and "Twenty Two," meant the same thing. A pier, a dock, a doctor and number 32 were synonymous in the killer’s mind with the violent dreams that Fuhrman told police psychiatrists about in the early ’80s. It told me that the object of his most persistent dreams of violence was O.J. Simpson.

From there I could have gone straight to Michael Douglas in Coma (’78) if I had been thinking "Orenthal" instead of O.J. I got there instead by way of the skeet-shooting scene in The Brotherhood of the Bell with Glenn Ford and Dean Jagger—the first cat in the hat that I associated with Dr. Seuss. Because Glenn Ford’s character was the one being set up, I followed the androgynous name link to Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction with Michael Douglas. Douglas appears in so many Fuhrman collection moves that there had to be something specific that tied them together, something that went back farther than any of the movies I could think of. Following Fuhrman’s research approach, I went to the Internet for the answer. There I found Coma, the Michael Crichton screenplay adapted from the Robin Cook novel. It has Michael Douglas as Dr. Mark Bellows who does something very similar to what Mark Fuhrman did in his first search of O.J.’s home.

Before I get into that, I should tell you that I was struck by a scene early in Coma where Mark, in his surgical cap, is framed in the same shot with a black doctor on a phone in his surgical cap. I didn’t get the full impact until I reviewed The Naked Gun and noticed for the first time that the doctor programmed to kill O.J. isn’t wearing a cap but O.J. is. That makes the phone in the black doctor’s hand a direct link to O.J.’s all-important use of a phone on the night of the murders and the morning of the search when Ron Phillips called him in Chicago. It was after Phillips talked to O.J. on the phone that Fuhrman reported finding the two sheer socks "out of place" in O.J.’s bedroom. The evidence that Mark Bellows finds out of place is a pair of pantyhose on a ladder in the Boston Memorial Hospital basement. Remind you of the socks in Joe Paris’s messy Boston apartment in Physical Evidence?

Enter four more "French connections."

If you’re thinking that the pantyhose could use an androgynous name to link them more securely to Mark Fuhrman’s "discovery" of O.J.’s socks, how about two androgynous names? Dana Andrews as detective Mark McPherson (pronounced McFuhrson) and Gene Tierney as the title character in Laura (’44) ought to do it. The French connection to Fuhrman is, of course, Gene, as in Gene Hackman who starred in The French Connection. The more I think of Gene Hackman and Gene Tierney the more I see why Fuhrman alluded to him in his explanation of the "composite character" he said he was creating for himself on the Laura Hart McKinny tapes.

In Laura the killer that Det. McPherson is looking for is an obsessed, egocentric celebrity/writer played by Clifton Webb (no relation to Jack Webb). McPherson, too, becomes obsessed with Laura, with what he’s learned about her and what he sees of her in a framed portrait. The victim proves to be another woman who was in the wrong place at the wrong time. The killer mistook her for the women he was expecting to see, the light was dime she was roughly Laura’s height and build, she was in Laura’s apartment and she was wearing Laura’s clothes.

The frame, the clothes and the obsession give us the second French connection, this one with Canadian-born actor Leslie Nielsen as Frank Drebin, O. J. Simpson as Nordberg and George Kennedy as Ed in The Naked Gun 33 1/3 (March 94). When Frank drops by the station after breaking up with Jane, his obsession with her prompts Nordberg to offer him the phone number of Jack   Kevorkian, a.k.a. Dr. Death (what do you want on your Tombstone?). Ed distracts his attention with an Eiffel Tower jigsaw puzzle and tells him to put it together.

Dr. Kevorkian was the retired Chief Pathologist at Detroit’s Saratoga General Hospital who helped people kill themselves mostly with carbon monoxide. He lived in Royal Oak MI and started his assisted suicide campaign in June of 1990 with Janet Adkins from Portland OR. Prior to the S. Bundy killings, all of his patients killed themselves in his care in or around the city of Detroit, the last being Ali Khalili on November 11, 1993. In The Naked Gun 2 ½, the bus that Nordberg gets stuck under when the car he was under before comes to a sudden stop and slings him forward, is bound for Detroit (Fuhrman’s story of the stick). Detroit was founded by a Frenchman. Detroit’s sister city in Europe is Paris.

The Eiffel Tower is to Paris what the Liberty Bell is to Philadelphia. George Kennedy handing O.J. a jigsaw puzzle box with a picture of the Eiffel Tower on the lid is the next French connection to Mark Fuhrman. To put it into perspective, it’s not enough to know that Nordberg was telling Drebin how sorry he was to hear about his split with Jane—the woman Drebin was obsessed with—when Ed handed him the box. You have to know that Boston’s Larry Joe Bird from French Lick Indiana was divorced from a woman named Janet. You have to remember that Janet Hackett was the ex-wife that Fuhrman told psychiatrists he would have killed along with the man she was seeing if he’d caught them together.

The last French connection borrows shoes and the Eiffel Tower’s builder Gustov Eiffel to go with a towering gift from the people of France. It has welcomed white people "…yearning to breath free" to America since 1886. We call it the Statue of Liberty. Ghostbusters II (’89) features Canadian-born Dan Aykroyd with Ernie Hudson future Groundhog Day collaborators Harold Ramis (the co-writer) and Bill Murray the star.

Fuhrman alluded to Ghostbusters in Murder in Brentwood. Fuhrman’sfriends, calling themselves "O.J. Busters" ordered caps with a red slash inside of a red circle with O.J.’s 32 where the Ghostbusters had a ghost in their logo. In Ghostbusters II Aykroyd, Ramous and Murray are doctors of psychology and parapsychology. They use "mood slime," Sam (Ghost) Cook music and a joy stick to pilot a walking Lady Liberty through deep water and down the New York City streets. Anyone who has been involved in a bloody event and suffered nightmares with water or "slime" instead of blood, will get the message.

Rare wet shoes and Lady Liberty. French Connection number three.

To kick things off on New Years Day 1990 (the first anniversary of the Rockingham incident with O.J. and Nicole) Bull Murray gets inside of Lady Liberty’s head with the other three Ghostbusters and makes a big announcement to the city of New York. He says, "…we’re going to squeeze some New Year’s juice out of you, big apple." This is not a case of mixing apples and O.J. The juice Murray is talking about is electricity. The slime comes alive with it. Electricity is the "juice" that makes Lady Liberty walk.

Where else have you seen Lady Liberty walk? How about a fifty-cent piece with a silver content worth one hundred times its face value? Now we’re talking big money. How much money did the Juice generate for Mark Fuhrman? How much alone from Fuhrman’s best selling book Murder in Brentwood?

A lot.

French Connection number four brings us back to Coma and the owner of the pantyhose that Dr. Mark Bellows finds in the basement of Boston Memorial. They belong to his girlfriend, a Boston Memorial physician named Susan Wheeler played by French-Canadian actress Geneviéve Bujold. Dr. Wheeler has done some checking on young, healthy patients at Boston Memorial like her best friend Nancy who came in for minor surgery and ended up brain dead. O.J. plays a wheelchair-bound, hammer-welding bodyguard named Allie Wheeler in No Place to Hide (’93).

To Dr. Wheeler, the numbers don’t add up, but she can’t get anyone to see the mismatch in statistics that she sees. In the real world, people are remarkably poor at calculating probabilities in an emotionally charged situation. They are also remarkably accepting of coincidence and other unexplained phenomena as reasonable explanations for unlikely statistical outcomes.

Wheeler thinks that the unnatural pattern she sees in the numbers that everyone else chalks up to imperfections in anesthetic medicine might be shaped by intelligent design. Not quite knowing where to start or what to look for, she casts a wide net for anything out of the ordinary that the victims may have had in common and finds that they had all been tissue-typed. However, she cannot make much of that when she learns that the tissue typing was ordered by a computer program of randomly selected patients as a quality control measure. It sounds reasonable, but she doesn’t have access she to the records needs to tell if it’s true.

To get the information she had on the unexplained comas she broke hospital rules and put herself on the outs with the head of Anesthesiology, Dr. George, by asking to review his records. The net result of her investigation was a stern rebuke from Dr. Harris, the Chief of Surgery, and a lecture from her ambitious boyfriend Mark about the political damage she was doing to him and herself by pressing the issue. Politics and ambition are two other things Mark Fuhrman had in common with Mark Bellows. Fuhrman’s leadership role in the Police Protective League and his strategically placed "friends" in the LAPD and the District Attorney’s office tells us all we need to know about that.

Fuhrman had something else in common with a doctor that I didn’t think of until I saw the autopsy scene in Coma. Dr. Wheeler walks through a corridor flanked by yapping dogs to the pathology room where her friend’s body was taken when her heart stopped beating. In 1978 brain death was still considered a coma although few people in or out of medicine truly thought of a brain dead person as being alive. If her hearth had not given out she would have been transferred to an automated, long-term care facility called the Jefferson Institute. As it is, the pathologists can give Dr. Wheeler the benefit of their experience to determine how someone might be able to induce brain death in select patients by deliberate action. One of the doctors suggests carbon monoxide (Dr. Kevorkian) as a perfect substitute for oxygen during the operation as a gas that would produce negligible irregularities in the proceedings and keep the blood flowing red so that the surgeon sees everything as it should be.

Now ask yourself what a pathologist has in common with a homicide detective and consider this exchange in Coma: Another doctor, played by a young Ed Harris with a full head of hair, thinks carbon monoxide is too mundane and makes an alternative suggestion involving an exotic drug. The first pathologist points out a flaw in his plan whereupon he comes up with another exotic drug to do the job. It’s clear that the two doctors have made a game of planning the perfect murder. The first doctor says, "We’d all make great murderers. I mean, who knows better about murder than a pathologist? Ed Harris replies, "It sure keeps my wife in line.

The sticking point in the 12 unexplained coma cases in one year that include Dr. Wheeler’s friend Nancy is the problem of how to administer the brain-killing agent. Neither pathologist has a ready answer. They therefore conclude that it can’t be done. One of them says, "Susan, whadaya think, there’s a conspiracy at the Boston Memorial Hospital involving all the anesthetists?"

If you watched the expert commentators during either of O.J. Simpson’s trials, you heard them laugh off the possibility of a conspiracy with the same kind of simplistic, knee-jerk, all-or-nothing thinking. They looked at the blood evidence and immediately concluded that the blood drops on Nicole’s walkway next the killer’s shoeprints must have been O.J. just as the test result indicated. They assumed that faking a positive result for O.J.’s blood where Fuhrman theorized the killer shed his own blood would have required a conspiracy involving so may police officers that the numbers alone ruled out all but the obvious answer.

In the end, however, just as it was in Coma with the carbon monoxide substituted for oxygen, the only thing that any of the blood on Bundy had to be was red. With the added suggestion that the killer left a blood trail from Bundy to Rockingham the illusion was nearly complete. He then needed only to switch the Bundy samples that supposedly came from the killer’s body with a sample from the blood that O.J. would have to give to the police to test against those blood drops. That’s it. A simple switch. But how? That was the question basketball fans used to ask about Julius Erving # 6 of the Philadelphia 76ers. Erving is better known as Dr. J. He invented the style of play that Michael Jordan perfected—going strong to the hoop with one hand and switching the ball to the other hand at the last possible moment to sink an "impossible" shot.

Coma answers those questions, too. This is what I meant when I said that I could have gone straight to Coma from the violent dreams Fuhrman told police psychiatrists about in the ’80s had I been thinking Orenthal instead of O.J. Dr. Wheeler knew enough about the unexplained comas to suspect a link between them and OR 8, the operating room where she knew that two of the brain deaths occurred. Dr. George would not let her see all of the records so she can’t be sure that OR 8 is a common denominator until she cons her way into his office and sneaks a peek at his files. Because Dr. George is looking for medical explanations he doesn’t see what the maintenance man does. The maintenance man’s observation gets him killed. A hitman who walks like O.J. and Fuhrman dumps a mop bucket over his head soaking his clothes and electrocutes him, but not before he tells Dr. Wheeler to meet him in the basement to show her how the brain deaths were induced.

Wheeler sees him getting zapped by the juice in the basement. It looks like an accident and nobody questions the apparent truth. The man hadn’t had a chance to show her what he’d found but once in the basement where she sees a canister marked oxygen that could, in fact, contain anything, she notices a line going to the ceiling. She follows the line up a ladder and through a crawlspace to an electronic switching box. There she looks down through an opening and sees OR 8.

See the Orenthal link?

No?

It’s not likely that you will unless you crawl inside of Mark Fuhrman’s head and see how OR 8 looks through the eyes of his obsession with Orenthal. Furthermore, you have to be so taken with Coma that significant aspects of it crept into your account of the S. Bundy murders.

Look at the ORder of Fuhrman’s notes. Number one begins, "Ofcr Riske…" OR. His note number 8 begins, "Pager…" In Coma Dr. Harris gives Dr. Wheeler a drug that simulates the symptoms of acute appendicitis. She has told Mark about OR 8 but he doesn’t believe her until Dr. Harris volunteers to do the operation himself and insists on using OR 8 when he is told that OR 7 is available. Wheeler is too out of it to say much but she manages to give Mark an excuse to investigate on his own by pressing his pager. Now look at the first two letters of Orenthal and count the total number of letters in the name. What do you get?

You get OR 8.

Fuhrman tells a story in his book Murder in Brentwood about the Juice in the basement laundering his murder clothes. No evidence was ever presented to support that idea and the only thing that comes close is what happens to the handyman in Coma. On top of that is the issue that Fuhrman made of the heavy-gage plastic he saw in O.J.’s Bronco—his suggestion that O.J. intended to use it as a body bag. Coma has more than its share of body bags including the one that was used to take away the victim of "the juice" who knew the secret of OR 8.

The OR 8 links to Fuhrman and the 875 S. Bundy murders don’t stop there. Consider the names that Fuhrman listed in Murder in Brentwood as his favorite athletes, George Foreman, Michael Jordan and Larry Bird. Just look at the ORs in is first choice, George Forman. Look at the OR in Jordan. Larry Bird was a forward on a professional basketball team in Boston, Massachusetts, the home of Boston Memorial. The number of letters in Bird’s given names, Larry and Joe, gives you 8. OR 8.

Consider the fact that Dr. George, the Chief of Anesthesiology at Boston Memorial who appears to be the brain killer in Coma is innocent, and the real villain is Dr. Harris the Chief of Surgery—Dr. George Harris. When you watch him remove his surgical gloves in OR 8 after the operation on Dr. Wheeler that he thought would kill her, think about the difference in how one removes those skintight latex gloves vs. how one removes cashmere-lined leather gloves. The trouble with the blood on the leather glove identified as O.J.’s was its location above the palm where you would expect to find it on a rubber glove peeled down from the wrist. Tight leather gloves are pulled off from the fingertips. To set O.J. up with the leather gloves the killer would have had to wear rubber gloves next to his own skin.

Could things have gotten just a tad confused in the excitement of the kill and the setup? Looks that way to me. It also looks to me as though the fingers of the latex gloves could stand in nicely for a symbolic representation of condoms.

One of the best known brand names of condoms is also the name of O.J.’s college football team, the Trojans. Both meanings of the name are significant in the bloody S. Bundy murders and frame-up because of Nicole’s legitimate, ongoing fear underlying the’89 New Years Day incident that O.J. might kill her. She wasn’t afraid that he would do it with a weapon his hands but the one he couldn’t keep in his pants. O.J. was promiscuous and Nicole was therefore afraid that he would give her AIDS. Two of the most famous people to have contracted the disease were the actor Rock Hudson (Rockingham) and the basketball superstar for the City of Angels home team, Magic Johnson—number 32. Johnson, was a teammate of O.J.’s friend Kareem Abdul Jabbar, number 33 and a friend of Fuhrman’s third favorite athlete, number 33, Larry Bird.

The more you learn about Fuhrman the more questions you have about Magic’s diagnoses of AIDS in 1991 when he was starring in so many popular TV commercials with Larry Bird. What bothers me is the social stigma attached to the disease, the broad cross-racial appeal he shared with O.J. as well as his number—all coupled with the 1991 timing of when the Bruno Magli Lorenzos first went on sale. Blood is the key.

Nobody knew what AIDS was when Coma came out and we got to see Dr. George at work with a knife in OR 8. But since then, condoms and latex gloves have been associated with protection from the deadly disease. In a state that has capital punishment, latex gloves can also offer life-saving protection in the execution of a bloody capital crime. It’s hard to see how the S. Bundy killer, in a panic, without one of his gloves, could have avoided pressing a bare finger into wet blood somewhere. Fuhrman and his partner are all that say he did. Something that looked like fingerprints from the distance at which others were forced to observe them before they disappeared. But they could just as easily have been made by latex gloves. Doctor’s aren’t the only professionals who wear latex gloves when they operate.

Richard Widmark is Dr. George Harris. Watching him in his long-sleeved surgical gown, his bloody gloves, his cap and his mask you get a close approximation of what Mark Fuhrman said that O.J. wore when he killed Ron and Nicole and did a striptease act when he was done. According to Fuhrman, O.J. lost both bloody gloves, like Dr. Harris did and his long-sleeved outer garment. The killer wasn’t wearing a mask as Fuhrman erroneously indicated in his notes. Dr. Harris was. It was a cap. It wasn’t black as Fuhrman said it was in his book. It was blue. Dr. Harris’s cap was blue. Fuhrman said Goldman pulled off the killer’s cap. Dr. Harris pulled his own cap off.