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Super-Sleuths, Super-Cops and Gumshoes
Dominick Dunne called Mark Fuhrman “...one of the great detectives of our time.” For most of us, great detectives exist only in popular fiction by way of the people who created them or the actors who brought them to life in the 20th century. As far as Mark Fuhrman is concerned, they can be roughly divided into three categories:
1) Super-sleuths in Fuhrman’s universe are distinguished by their uncanny ability to solve murder mysteries with the tiniest clues that either no one else observes or believes are relevant. There is always a moment when everything comes together for them in a blinding flash of insight. In the end, the killer is trapped in the super-sleuth’s irrefutable logic and revealed to the audience in a dramatic recreation of the crime.
2) Fuhrman’s super-cops can be super-sleuths, super-thugs with police badges or some
3) The gumshoes are usually tough, down-to-earth private investigators with a flair for snappy patter, clever putdowns and dramatic exit lines. They rely mostly on gut feelings, informants, time-tested investigative techniques and dogged persistence to “nail” the killer. They are not above using violence and threats of violence along the way. There is always a woman like Fuhrman’s Hildy Southerlyn that he can count on for valuable information. Smooth, cultured well-healed PIs are the exceptions.
These categories sometimes overlap with characters like Michael Caine’s fictionalized version of Scotland Yard’s historical Fred Abberline or Christopher Meloni as Fuhrman in Murder in Greenwich (2002). To do that, the character’s creator has to know who they are and where they fit into the way his character operates. For Fuhrman, that’s automatic. He actually says very little about himself in any forum as the high school football player, the Marine or even the cop. What he displays instead are composite characters from film and television.
You don’t have to remember the names or follow the blue links below to proceed. They are for reference only. A quick scan will suffice. You should click the green ones.
Super-sleuths
Monsieur Auguste Dupin (1841) Created by Edgar Allan Poe: Played by Leon Ames, George C. Scott
Sherlock Holmes. (1887) Created by Arthur Conan Doyle. Played by George C. Scott, Michael Caine, Basil Rathbone, Christopher Lee, Robert Stephens, Peter Cushing Christopher Plummer, Peter Lawford, Peter O'Toole, Jeremy Brett, Charlton Heston Roger Moore
Charlie Chan (1920) Created by Earl Derr Biggers Played by Sidney Toler, Roland Winters, J. Carrol Naish, Keye Luke, Ross Martin
Hercule Poirot (1920) Created by Agatha Christie Played by Peter Ustinov, Ian Holm Albert Finney, Tony Randall
Philo Vance (1926) Created by S.S. Van Dine Played by William Powell, Basil Rathbone, Paul Lukas
Miss. Jane Marple (1927) Created by Agatha Christie. Played by Helen Hayes, Margaret Rutherford, Angela Lansbury
Ellery Queen (1928) Created by Daniel Nathan and Manford Lepofsky: Played by Lee Philips, Lee Bowman, Peter Lawford, Jim Hutton
Dr. Crabtree (1931) Created by S.S. Van Dine Played by Donald Meek
Hildegarde Martha Withers (1932) Created by Stuart Palmer (born June 21, 1905 – died February 4, 1968, also wrote Murder in Times Square). Played by Edna May Oliver Penguin Pool Murder, Murder on a Blackboard, Murder on a Honeymoon, Zasu Pitts, Eve Arden
Nick Charles (1934) Created by Dashiell Hammett Played by William Powell, Peter Lawford, Jim Hutton
Nero Wolfe (1934) Created by Rex Stout Played by Edward Arnold, William Conrad, Maury Chaykin.
Batman, aka Bruce Wayne (1939) Created for DC Comics by Bob Kane, and Bill Finger Recreated for1966 TV series by Lorenzo Semple Jr., Played by Adam West
Perry Mason, Ben Matlock, Columbo, J.B. Fletcher and Remington Steele are super-sleuths specifically created for television.
Columbo
(Peter Falk) Created by
Richard Levinson
& William
Link (character)
Never mind the fact that Perry Mason (Raymond Burr) and Ben Matlock (Andy Griffith) are lawyers with crack investigators on their payroll. These lawyers invariably make the observations and deduction in the tradition of Edgar Allan Poe's Dupin and the super-sleuths who followed him, that solve the crimes.
LAPD Homicide Det. Columbo is one of the rare super-sleuths who works within the official framework of the police establishment (Charlie Chan was the first). He’s an unassuming genius. He gets the job done by exaggerating his apparent flaws to get the brilliant killers he investigates to underestimate him and to incriminate themselves in the process.
Like Miss. Marple, J.B. Fletcher’s (Angela Lansbury) first name is Jane. Like Ellery Queen, she’s a famous murder mystery writer. She lives in Cabot Cove, Main where more people are murdered per capita than in Al Capone's Chicago. She has an uncanny way of being drawn into real murder mysteries and solving them the way her protagonists do in her books.
Remington Steele is a dapper, P.R. figurehead super-sleuth that Laura Holt invented to get her detective agency off the ground. An international jewel thief with a British accent and many names taken from Humphrey Bogart movie roles poses as Steele to evade his competitors and the police. He ends up fronting as Steele while Laura does the actual detective work. He is a walking encyclopedia of movies from titles, studios, actors, plots and dates down to the smallest details. In every investigation, he sees movie parallels that he thinks will break the case. He eventually learns enough about being a “real” detective and Laura learns enough about taking practical ideas from movies to help them break the toughest cases as real partners.
Super Cops
Inspector Charlie Chan (1920) Created by E. D. Biggers Played by Warner Oland from 1931 to 1937
Frank Bullitt 1968 Created by Robert L. Fish Played by Steve McQueen
“Dirty Harry” Callahan 1971 Created by Harry Julian Fink, Rita M. Fink, and Jo Heims Played by Clint Eastwood
Jimmy “Pop-eye” Doyle 1971 Created by Robin Moore, Howard Hawks and Edward M. Keyes Played by Gene Hackman
Frank Drebin 1982 Created by Jim Abrahams, David Zucker, Jerry Zucker Played by Leslie Nielsen
Norman Buntz 1983 Created by S. Bochco and M. Kozoll Played by Dennis Franz
Axel Foley 1984 Created by Danilo Bach Played by Eddie Murphy
Rick Hunter 1984 Created by Frank Lupo Played by Fred Dryer
“Cobra” 1986 Created by Paula Gosling Played by Sylvester Stallone
Joe Paris 1989 Created by Steve Ransohoff Played by Burt Reynolds (video clip)
Andy Sipowicz 1993 Created by Steven Bochco and David Milch Played by Dennis Franz
Although Fuhrman named Andy Sipowicz as an exemplar of the composite character he said he was “play acting” on the McKinny tapes in 1985 and ’86, he didn’t exist until 1993. The brutal, racist aspect of Fuhrman’s “character” on the tapes was strictly Norman Buntz who lived on television from 1983 to 1987. Dennis Franz played both of them. Inconsistencies like these teach you to follow the actor for a closer look at how the “creative” machinery in Fuhrman’s head works. You go where the actor goes and look around for other actors, names, numbers and items of special interest to him.
The 1951 radio and TV character Joe Friday that came to the big screen in Dragnet (1954) is a special case. Friday is not a super-cop. He’s just the best known name and badge number to emerge from the prolific writing, producing, acting and directing career of Jack Webb. Sergeant Joe Friday’s 714 badge number is synonymous with the character and his creator. Webb also wrote for the 1978 TV series Project U.F.O.
Gumshoes
Bulldog Drummond 1929 (first talkie) Created by Herman Cyril McNeile Played by Ronald Colman, Ray Milland, Tom Conway, Walter Pidgeon
Nick Carter 1939 Updated to the 20th century from an 1880’s dime novel series by Bertram Millhauser Played by Walter Pidgeon, Robert Conrad
Sam Spade 1930 Created by Dashiell Hammett Played by Humphrey Bogart
Philip Marlowe 1939 Created by Raymond Chandler Played by Humphrey Bogart, George Montgomery, Dick Powell, James Garner, Elliott Gould, Robert Mitchum, Powers Boothe
Richard Diamond 1949 radio series. Created by unnamed NBC executives. Written by Blake Edwards (born July 26, 1922). Played by Dick Powell (radio) David Janssen (TV).
Mike Hammer 1947 Created by Mickey Spillane Played by Biff Elliot (the first on-screen Mick Hammer was born on July 26, 1923), Ralph Meeker, Darren McGavin, Mickey Spillane, Kevin Dobson, Armand Assante, Stacy Keach
Spencer 1973 Created by Robert B. Parker Played by Robert Urich
Thomas Magnum 1980 Created by Donald P. Bellisario, and Glen A. Larson Played by Tom Selleck
Mike Murphy 1984 Created by Blake Edwards Played by Burt Reynolds
Joe Hallenbeck 1991 Created by Shane Black Played by Bruce Willis
Fuhrman is the super-sleuth in all of his crime-solving books as well as in his Murder in Greenwich movie. In his movie, he says that he came to Greenwich because he’s “still a cop” – the super-cop of film and television imbedded in his LAPD history. He comes as close as possible to the gumshoe while maintaining his family man image. He can’t use a gun or rough people up the way he did as an LAPD officer but he gets the idea across with “Hildy Southerlyn’s” remark about his “moonlighting” (the man he put in a choke-hold and threatened to kill for j-walking) He conjures up the gumshoe in his tough, down-to-earth working Joe sweater and bomber jacket costume, snappy patter, clever putdowns and dramatic exit lines. He supplements his genius with time-tested investigative techniques, gut feelings, informants, and dogged persistence to find out “who done it.” His writing partner in the movie calls him “gumshoe.” Fuhrman’s character follows up the gumshoe crack with a line he will use on the police chief later in the movie. He approached the retired police investigator on the Martha Moxley murder case and gives him a variant of a tag line from Nick Carter Master Detective before accusing him of gross incompetence. When Walter Pidgeon’s Nick Carter delivered an insult like that he would then say with naked insincerity, “If I’m wrong, I’ll apologize.” Fuhrman turns that line into a nakedly insincere apology for what he’s going to do. He says, “I’m going to insult you now so let me apologize in advance.” I was always curious about the “Murder in...” title of Fuhrman’s first book about him, the great detective, and his partner Brad Roberts doing everything right to win a conviction against O.J. Simpson. It was about the incompetence of the detectives who replaced them, the “race card” machinations of the defense, and the bungling of the prosecution. It was about Fuhrman getting into trouble for using composite characters from movies to play a part for a screenplay project. It was supposed to be about his role in the 1994 double homicide investigation in the Brentwood neighborhood of L.A. that occasioned the trial of the 20th century. I wondered why it wasn’t called The Murders in Brentwood?
The question didn’t loom large in my mind until I decided to write a quick reference guide to movies growing out of Fuhrman’s Death and Justice interview with Bill Bickel. I started with Edgar Allan Poe whose name popped up on a bar sign in a 1968 Dean Martin-Robert Mitchum western called 5 Card Stud when I was looking for something else. It eventually looped back to a bar scene in Murder in Greenwich by way of evocative scenes in The House on Carroll Street ('88) with an actor named Jeff in a starring role and a leading character named Jeff in A Night to Remember ('42).
In F
It then occurred to me that Poe, the “man from Baltimore,” became the father of the entire detective story genre with the 1841 publication of The_Murders_in_the_Rue_Morgue.
Although I hadn’t read the story and had to look up the publication date (shades of Jeff Daniels as Mike Cochran in The House on Carroll Street – video clip), I recalled the plot from a movie I’d seen on TV in the ‘70s or 80s. I hadn’t seen it since then so I had to look that up, too. It was The Murders in the Rue Morgue with George C. Scott as Auguste Dupin.
This 1988 TV movie comes the closest to Poe’s story, although the time is shifted to later in the 19th century, after the term “detective” was coined, and makes Dupin a former part of the Paris police establishment, which Poe’s Dupin was not. This version of the story includes a cop telling the great detective how many people had investigated the murders in the Rue Morgue apartment building before him (Murder in Greenwich) and Fuhrman’s “real alibi” (suggested by Bill Pavelic) for the Murders on Bundy.
I knew that Poe’s murder mystery was the first story of its kind in any form. That, to me, meant that Fuhrman was likely to have taken some of the super-sleuth qualities he arrogated to himself from the first screenplay adaptation of the story that he saw on television. I found it in my first attempt by ignoring the silent movie version and looking for a date corresponding to the oldest movie that would have been shown on TV.
The title is Murders in the Rue Morgue, without the “The” and with little resemblance to Poe’s story. The release date is 1932. The actor playing Poe’s great Paris detective Auguste Dupin is Leon Ames. In the 1960 pilot for the TV series Maggie, Ames is Mark Bradley (Brad Roberts’ full name is “Bradford Harold Roberts). In Sherlock Holmes in New York with Charlotte Rampling (Fuhrman’s birthday), Ames is Daniel Furman. James is Mark Fuhrman’s middle name. In They Were Expendable, Leon Ames is James Morton.
In Fuhrman’s 2005 interview with Bill Bickel, he seemed to pull Burt Reynolds’ name out of nowhere. Reynolds’ middle name is Leon. Moreover, a controversial story about Edgar Allan Poe has it that he called out the name Reynolds in a Baltimore hospital the day before he died. Fuhrman need not have watched any Leon Aims movie with his role as Poe’s great detective in mind. To pick out the ones that found their way into the cinema-rich way that he habitually expresses himself, all he needed was in the title, the synopses, and the top billing of the actors in any TV guide. His writing partner uses one from a newspaper in Murder in Greenwich to tell him, “Cops is on.”
Jeff Troy is a murder mystery writer. His wife is
Nancy. Old Hickory is a turtle left at a
The lead NYPD homicide detective is Inspector Hankins. He puts Jeff at the top of his suspect list because of circumstantial evidence that initially points to him.
I wasn’t looking for anything specific when I set my DVR to record A Night to Remember in the first week of January, 2011. That's when I started writing this piece to show the influence of Edgar Allan Poe on some of Fuhrman's most easily recognized composite characters. I just thought that a movie with Brian Aherne and Loretta Young about a murder mystery writer who gets caught up in a real murder mystery might shed new light on Fuhrman’s “Remington Steele” imagination. That’s where I found an explicit Baltimore (Edgar Allan Poe) link to the relevant barroom scene in Murder in Greenwich in a Jumble Puzzle code that changed everything.
Brian Aherne is Dr. Harry Blair unknowingly married to a pathological liar, thief and killer in The Locket (heart shaped with a diamond center). Starring with Aherne in this 1946 movie is Laraine Day as his wife Nancy and Robert Mitchum (Harry Powell in The Night of the Hunter) as her ex-husband. Loretta Young is a Connecticut college town woman unknowingly married to a Nazi war criminal in The Stranger (’46). In A Night to Remember (’42) Brian Ahern and Loretta Young are a well adjusted couple happily married to each other like Mark and Caroline Fuhrman in Murder in Greenwich.
If I’d known that the setting was Greenwich Village and Sidney “Charlie Chan” Toler was the police inspector in charge, I wouldn’t have had to watch A Night to Remember twice. I would not only have seen how much it had to do with Fuhrman’s “imagination” from the start, I would have anticipated it
The first time around, I paid no attention to the starting
credits that listed Sidney Toler or the
I was thinking more of a horseshoe’s nail holes and the Sherlock Holmes moment that Fuhrman gave himself with the nail hole in the stick next to the tire of O.J.’s Bronco.
Brian Ahern and Loretta Young are Jeff and Nancy Troy. The horseshoe should have primed me for more items in Fuhrman’s first two “Murder in...” projects. The question is this: What does a horseshoe have in common with the heel of a human shoe like the one in Fuhrman’s pointing finger photo – the one he called attention to in the color photo section of Murder in Brentwood I’d run into something similar in The Bad Seed with metal cleats, inferentially attached by nails with a hammer, on the heel of a killer’s shoe. I made that connection in an Audi Murphy western with a killer’s horseshoe and a blacksmith’s hammer. It seemed like a bit of a stretch then. Now it doesn’t.
The Troys didn't notice the horseshoes on the wall in back of the bar. I did -- after the polo mallets activated my Fuhrman bell ringer movie scanner.
Polo was important enough for Fuhrman to mention on his second page (page 4) of the first chapter of his Murder in Greenwich book. If the chapter heading and the space between it and the first line of text hadn’t been there, it would have been on his first page.
In Fuhrman’s movie, the polo player’s mallet becomes a croquet mallet. His screenplay character makes a hypothetical substitution of the mallet for the golf club that was used to bludgeon Martha Moxley to death. That brings us to Leon Ames, the actor who played the super-sleuth in the 1942 screenplay version of Edgar Allan Poe’s The Murders in the Rue Morgue and his Mark Bradley role in Maggie. In the movie version of Murder in Greenwich, Maggie Grace is Martha Moxley. If she hadn’t been cast for the part the Maggie Mae background song in the bonfire scene would have filled in the gap.
Brad Roberts was not Fuhrman’s partner in his Murder in Greenwich book. There is no Brad, no Leon and no Ames in the movie. But without “Brad” there would have been no Murder in Brentwood book. Without Murder in Brentwood there would have been no Murder in Greenwich book or movie. As the producer, however, Fuhrman undoubtedly had a say in the casting and the song. It’s the sort of thing that hands-on producers do given their power to fire writers, directors and casting agents who disagree with them. It is inconceivable to me that Fuhrman would be anything less than a hands-on producer of a movie bearing the title of his second book on The New York Times Bestseller list.
A Night to Remember puts both of these “Murder in...” books together with big chunks of each sprinkled throughout. It has a former speakeasy named Joe’s Place and a murder suspect named Turner In Three Days of the Condor Robert Redford as Joe Turner kidnaps a photographer played by Faye Dunaway and holds her captive in her New York City basement apartment.
A Night to Remember gets its name from the night that Jeff and Nancy Troy moved into a New York City basement apartment a few days before it was ready to occupy. They have to use candle light to see where they’re going because their electricity hadn’t been turned on. They also have to wait for their furniture. Nancy shows Jeff the courtyard where he finds the horseshoe. With little to do in the dark, they go to dinner at Polly's Stable Restaurant where they have meaningful encounters with the owner and the man who is going to be killed.
When they return they notice odd things that suggest someone had been there. The candle that should have been burning is out. The horseshoe that Jeff left on the windowsill is on the floor. They hear running water in the bathroom and go in with the candle they lit to see water running down the bathtub drain. As if they weren’t spooked enough by what they’d seen so far, they go back into the bedroom where Nancy sets the candle down and it moves slowly across the floor. Jeff runs it down and starts laughing because he sees that Nancy had set the candle down on the back of a turtle.
From the first time Jeff and Nancy entered the apartment, Jeff had a feeling that he’d been there before. Discovering the turtle pops everything into place in his mind. It’s not just any turtle, it’s Old Hickory, a leftover from prohibition when their apartment was a speakeasy – Joe’s Place. Jeff had won a New Year’s Eve drinking contest there and his initials were carved on the back of Old Hickory’s shell along with the initials of previous winners.
Jeff’s discovery of the turtle and the mysteries it solves breaks the tension. Their furniture arrives and they retire for the night.
Th
Considering that the murder being investigated was in Greenwich Village, you might wonder why the movie wasn’t called Murder in Greenwich Village. Perhaps it was because A Night to Remember was released five years after the release of another murder mystery movie called Murder in Greenwich Village with Richard Arlen (died on Billie Fuhrman’s birthday in 1976), Fay Wray and Leon Ames.
On the other hand, Jeff’s “Murder in...” books could have been titled to illustrate his limited creative talents. Two other titles from is bookshelf begin with “Murder on.” He uses the penname Jeff Yort – Troy spelled backward. He thinks the name is very clever. Inspector Hankins disagrees. He tells Jeff that he read one of his books and he thought it “knits.” He tells Jeff to spell that backward. Jeff starts with a smile, “s-t-i-n...” Whoa!
The last letter (k) happens to by what you would need in a Fuhrman-Roberts code to turn Yort into York – as in Judge Ito’s wife and Mark Fuhrman’s former precinct captain Margaret “Peggy” York. On page 276 of Murder in Brentwood, Mark Fuhrman strongly suggests that Johnnie Cochran blackmailed Ito into leaving York off the witness stand in exchange for allowing the McKinny audio tapes into evidence.
Blackmail is, of course at the heart of the murder mystery in A Night to Remember. Jeff Troy is a prolific writer. He has to be to make up for the uninspired quality of his work. He knows he’s a hack. This aspect of his writing comes out in a scene where he laments his failure to write “a really successful book.” Nancy tells him that it’s because he keeps writing murder mysteries. He says, “No. It’s because they’re corny murder mysteries. Well this time I’ve got a real plot. I’m going to find out who killed that guy and then I’ll write the novel. Think of the publicity I’ll get.”
Mark Fuhrman took Jeff’s publicity idea one step further in Murder in Brentwood. I have no doubt that he committed the murders as a publicity stunt to write the book. As the lead investigator, he inserted himself into a murder case with built-in publicity-generating power. He borrowed plots, subplots, scenarios, characters, props costumes, clues, etc. from hundreds of TV shows and movies that were adapted from novels, and put them into a “non-fiction” book with the indispensible help of his partner, Brad Roberts.
How much of Fuhrman’s first two high profile cases that he turned into books and a movie are woven into A Night to Remember?
Murder in Fuhrman’s Brain
NAMES — Jeff, Old Hickory, Joe, Jackson, turtle, bathtub, Rockingham
The Skakel’s gardener in Fuhrman’s movie can’t recall the first name of a man who came to the Skakel’s house the day Martha Moxley’s body was found with her head bashed in. He thinks that it’s John or Jeff. All he knows for sure is that it started with a J. Fuhrman’s writing partner learns that it’s Jackson as in Shoeless Joe. Fuhrman made up these “first” names. The first two are actually the first syllable of U.S. Presidents’ last names; Johnson and Jefferson. Jackson is Andrew Jackson, aka “Old Hickory.”
The numbering of Fuhrman’s Bundy notes has a remarkable correlation to the order of U.S. Presidents in a Jumble puzzle code. The 7th note says something very interesting about Old Hickory – and the chalk marks on the artificial stone in Fuhrman’s Mothers poem photo – and the heart drawn in blood in Fuhrman’s pointing finger photo –and the turtle swimming in the aquarium on top of a wooden (hickory?) chest in Fuhrman’s make believe home. In Mirage (1965), Joe Turtle is a private guard in the lobby of a New York City skyscraper. A chemical engineer suffering an odd manifestation of amnesia finds his body in a bathtub with his head bashed in (upper left corner of screenshot). Fuhrman said that he and Roberts saw an empty knife box on the rim of O.J.’s bathtub on Rockingham. He first cited “amnesia” as the cause of him denying his use of the n-word. In his movie he gives a noble explanation for why he “lied.”
Fuhrman told a rare story about himself as a Marine (bulldog) military policeman under cross-examination in the O.J. murder trial. He said that he played cards in an undercover (secret) role to get information in a CID drug investigation. Then again, it wasn't actually a story, just a bare bones answer to a question by O.J.'s attorney. The story is in a 1984 episode of Magnum, P.I. with Tom Selleck as the undercover card player.
In Bulldog Drummond's Secret Police (’39), Neil Fitzgerald, the actor who plays Joe Turtle in Mirage, is the Rockingham (England) stationmaster. Four years earlier he was a colonel’s aid in Charlie Chan in Shanghai.
In Goldie and the Boxer (’79), O.J. Simpson is Joe.
It cannot be an accident that the name of the guard at the entrance of the Belle Haven community in Fuhrman’s 2002 movie is Joe. It cannot be an accident that Steve Carroll tells Fuhrman they worked together “about a hundred years ago.” Shoeless Joe Jackson (Say it ain’t so, Joe sign with Fuhrman outside of the Ashford gates) began his Major League career in 1908. His full name was Joseph Jefferson Jackson. His famous “Black Betsy” bat, copied by George Herman “Babe” Ruth, weighed a very heavy 48 ounces because he “whittled it” out of hickory. “Old Hickory” was later stamped on the barrel. Most wooden baseball bats have been made of ash since the 1880s
HORSES — According to Fuhrman’s Murder in Brentwood, Nicole’s mortal fear of O.J. begins with seeing him get out of his Bronco dressed strangely and recalling his “strange” behavior at their daughter Sydney’s dance recital.
The silhouette of a man with a cape and a three corner hat sits on the second horse. It’s on
LIT CANDLES — Murder in Brentwood, page 14: “As we walked through the house, I noted that there were lit candles in the bathroom and around the tub, and also in the living room.”
WATER IN A BATHTUB — What Fuhrman didn’t say about Nicole’s bathtub is as telling as what he did say. About four hours after the murders, Officer Riske showed Fuhrman the bathtub. It was full of water. When Fuhrman’s supervisor Ron Phillips showed RHD Det. Vannatter the bathroom, the water had drained out.
FENCING — On the second page of The Murder Weapon, chapter 15 in Murder in Brentwood, Fuhrman uses the word “fencing” three times to tell his story of tracing the origin of the wood he found next to O.J.’s Bronco. This is where he theorized O.J. dropped the Swiss Army knife. But he uses three other words on that page to give “fencing” another meaning. The words are: weapon, sport and tip. The sport where the tip of a weapon is used to score points is, of course, fencing. Another word that Fuhrman uses on that page in conjunction with fencing is "collision." Sounds to me like Fuhrman's version of another story.
GOLF CLUB — On the morning of the Simpson-Goldman murders, O.J. played golf at his country club. Shortly before he made his cell phone call to Paula Barbieri, he said that he was looking for a golf club he never found. On page 310 of Murder in Brentwood, Fuhrman says this about O.J.’s daughter Sydney. “On her birthday, the Juice played golf.” Martha Moxley was beaten to death with a golf club. In Fuhrman’s movie, he has Michael Skakel selecting it from a golf bag as a weapon of convenience and clubbing Martha in the head with it.
A MAN DEFENDING A WOMAN AGAINST A KILLER WITH A KNIFE WEARING LEATHER GLOVES — Everybody knows that story... --Jasper |
proportion of each. He named the actor
playing one of these characters as the man who inspired him to become a cop. He named some of them as models he used to impress movie producers and alluded to a
fictional character based on a real one. The same actor played two of Fuhrman’s TV cops. Another one had a direct role in his perjury conviction. The most unlikely Fuhrman super cop of all is 1982’s 
uhrman’s movie, 
informant
Fuhrman bell ringers (13, 75, 25 and birds – a
flock of pigeons) clustered in the first two minutes of the film. 
About ten
minutes into A Night to Remember I noticed the equestrian theme in the 
the marquee of the Paul Revere Middle School where the recital was held. Another
horse was in Nicole’s garage, the prancing black stallion logo on her white Ferrari and in O.J. Garage on his red Ferrari. Fuhrman wrote about his “farm” in Idaho where he had “horses,
goats and sheep” (page 316). In the next paragraph he says he gave his wife a horse and trailer for Christmas, a bigger and healthier horse than his “old nag.” He gets a
horse into his Murder in Greenwich movie by renaming the Terrien family “
