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Picture Gallery Anagrams Swiss Army Watch Pictograms Telling a Story
Sometimes a murder scene photo can tell a better story than expert analysis of that evidence can tell. For instance, the envelope next to Mark Fuhrman's foot in his long-shot pointing finger photo holds the prescription reading glasses of Nicole's mother Juditha Brown. It tells the story of why Ron Goldman was in the place were he died. According to that story Juditha forgetting her glasses in the Mezzaluna restaurant and Ron would not have been there if he hadn't volunteered to take them to her daughter Nicole. Nobody testified to seeing O.J. on or around Nicole’s courtyard on Bundy wearing brown leather gloves and a blue knit cap. Nevertheless, those items made virtual eye-witnesses out of millions of people who’d seen the Fuhrman pointing finger photo close-up as well as O.J. wearing similar gloves on a sports TV show and a similar cap in a popular movie. The more you learn about the evidence used against O.J. Simpson, the more of it you can see in the close-up Bundy photo that would fit inside of a ten-speed bicycle tire. The closer you study five of the items inside of that imaginary tire, the more they resemble a screen shot from Jack the Ripper ('88). Spreading out from there, the crime scene photos continue to tell stories from movies and TV shows. They tell a wide variety of them along with cinematic clichés common to crime dramas and murder mysteries in general. The killer wearing a knit cap (or ski mask in Fuhrman’s Bundy notes) is one of those clichés. A killer with a knife wearing gloves, especially dark leather gloves, is another one. When you see the killer in the moves wearing light colored gloves, it is usually to make it easier to see the blood on them. The bloody leather gloves photographed on Bundy and Rockingham give you the “best” of both. Screenplays often give a clue to whether an unknown killer is male or female by framing a shot of his or her shoes approaching the victim or walking away from the body. A female killer almost invariably wears high heels or no shoes. A male killer's shoes frequently have a distinctive appearance. When he wears boots they are usually construction boots or cowboy boots with high heels. The bloody heelprint on Bundy plays into all of those movie conventions including the brand name of the dead womans shoes. Murder in Brentwood, page 182: "Marcia insisted on nailing down details she had no way of proving. When you are building a timeline for a murder, you have to remain flexible. People are often wrong or contradictory in estimating time. Their watches are set differently, and their memory can be hazy... Marcia had enough evidence and enough witnesses to place the murders at some point between 10:00 and 10:45 p.m. Instead, she claimed that the murders occurred between 10:00 and 10:15 p.m. when two of their witnesses testified hearing the Akita bark... The dog's barking is not very strong evidence to establish the time of the murders." A broken timepiece on the scene of
a violent murder is another arrow pointing to the movies. How often
does that happen outside of the movies? Look at Nicole's left wrist.
That's where she wore her
Swiss Army watch. It was
stopped at 10:03. The photo says it was broken when Nicole's
lifeless body hit the ground. So does Bill Pavelic
on his 2006 webpage in which he put up this excerpt from the book he
said he was writing. "…When
this atrocious slaying was over, the analogue wristwatch Nicole wore
on her left wrist lay face down against the
sidewalk. Her watch stopped
ticking at 10:03 hours, give or take a couple of minutes.
Police reports and witness interviews would reveal that the Akita
dog started barking at 10:03, the precise time that Nicole’s watch
stopped..." The photo makes that Pavelic story sound credible. There's another story in the photo of Nicole's body in Murder in Brentwood. People who fall unconscious to the ground sometimes end up in strange positions depending on what’s between them and the ground. When they writhe in pain before they expire they sometimes end up on their sides. But they don’t fall that way. Actors without a stunt double frequently fall that way on camera to avoid injury. Some of these things have appeared
on real world crime scenes but how many of them have you even heard
of appearing in one crime scene and extending to another? How many
of them have so many items of evidence in
the same tight cluster?
This is some of the storytelling evidence left behind by the killer of Ron
Goldman and Nicole Simpson in 1994. Who do you know who draws this
heavily from the movies to say and do big things? —Jasper
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