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From: Jasper
Date: 2/2/03
Time: 2:40:46 AM
Remote Name: 66.72.161.126
Rose,
Here is your corrected URL www.theatlantic.com
Unfortunately, I don’t have any hard evidence on when Fuhrman became interested in Dunne or the Skakels. I know that he did by way of the movie connections but I’m still struggling to show why that is a valid way of doing it in the absence of hard evidence. I think, though, that we can make some reasonable judgments based on what we do know.
It turns out that there was a considerable amount of national publicity on the Moxley murder in ’91, ’92 and ’93 following the rape trial of William Kennedy Smith. Dunne started it and kept at it until he brought Fuhrman aboard (officially) after the 1997 publication of Murder in Brentwood. I missed all of that stuff because, frankly, I had zero interest in the Smith case and I didn’t know or care who Dominick Dunne was. Fuhrman was different.
Fuhrman joined the LAPD in August 1975, only a few months before the Moxley murder. From his earliest reviews his supervisors took note of his concentration on trying to “make the big arrest” at the expense of what he was supposed to be doing. To Fuhrman, the Moxley murder would have sounded all kinds of gongs just because someone related to the Kennedys (Tommy) was a suspect. When Dominique Dunn was murdered in 1982 Fuhrman was on leave from the LAPD still fighting for his disability retirement. This case was close to home and involved a young actress in a popular movie (Poltergeist – ghost) as the victim as well as a successful writer as the murder victim’s father.
When Fuhrman went back to work in ’83 he was assigned to an area where there were lots of celebrities. In ’84 he paid his visit to the Simpsons on a 911 call that was not recorded or recalled until 1989 (look for baseball bats as symbolic murder weapons in Fuhrman’s movie). In ’85 he began his partnership with Laura Hart to write and sell as screenplay. Over the next nine years he met with producers and got a first-hand look at how the industry worked. He moonlighted as a security officer for Johnny Carson. He said that he patterned himself after Joseph Wambaugh, a successful crime writer. Dominick Dunne was not only a successful writer, he was also a successful crime writer.
When you add it all up, the question becomes, how could Fuhrman NOT have taken a strong interest in Dominick Dunn’s work before 1993 (when Dunne published A Season in Purgatory)? Dunne’s “Kennedy” book was not the big thing. The big thing was Dominique Dunne’s murder and the articles that Dominick Dunne wrote afterwards that led to the book.
There are just too many similarities in the facts of Bundy murders and the Moxley murder and Fuhrman’s fictitious versions of them for there not to be a connection. That connection appears to me to be Dominick Dunne. –Jasper