Chapter 5

As soon as the human brain begins to form it starts laying down communications tracks between cells. As we mature some tracks get more traffic than others, forming networks that are very hard to break. When we try to rout an idea along theses tracks we might end up on a tour of the whole network. The only things that separate creative thinking from non-creative thinking are the speed and cleanliness with which we can tear up old thought tracks and lay down new ones. That’s why children are more creative than adults and often surprise us with the things they say and do. The essence of creativity is surprise.  

All the technical proficiency in the world cannot elevate an artistic work above the level of mediocrity if it doesn’t produce something surprising. If you have a feeling that you know what’s coming or that something looks or sounds familiar, chances are good that your subconscious knows where that feeling comes from. If you try to put it out of your mind by doing something else the thing you do will often give you the key to finding it. It’s not magic; it’s a common from of free association – of connecting the conscious tracks with the subconscious ones.  

I was stuck on all the directions I could go from where I ended the previous chapter with women standing in for Fuhrman when I decided to clear my mind by doing something unrelated. I wasn’t conscious of Penguin Pool Murder’s sly hint that Hildegarde Withers had lesbian experience when I decided to watch The Monkey’s Mask (2000) for the second time in several months mostly for the sex scenes I recalled. It was just the first thing that popped into my mind. I missed the Murder in Greenwich links the first time but this time I couldn’t miss them. The trick was to see a petite, young, Australian, lesbian ex-cop named Jill Fitzpatrick as a big, middle-aged, American, male, ex-cop. Jill’s leather jacket was the key. 

Jill is a private investigator who was once married to a woman named Chris. When I couldn’t tell whether her leather jacket was black or dark brown, I started seeing other details. I noticed specific words and phrase, red drapes, rain, etc. I noticed that the older, wealthy, woman Jill has a crush on is a writer and a teacher who used the word “transmogrified” when telling Jill about her change of interest from classical poetry to the poetry of popular culture. Most people say “morphed.”  

Later in The Monkey’s Mask, Jill looks at photos of a missing teenage girl named Mickey that her parents hired her to find. She feels guilty that her lust for Mickey’s poetry teacher Diana is causing her to lose focus. Before Jill learns that Mickey has been murdered, she sits at a restaurant table with Diana and her husband Nick, a proudly amoral lawyer with no sympathy for victims of violent crimes. He greets Jill with the words, “Most PI’s I meet are big, ugly pricks; ex-cops, too bad even for the force.” Diana says with a wink that Jill was too short. Christopher Meloni is nearly perfect for Fuhrman except he is too short.  

The photo of “Martha Moxley” on “Mark Fuhrman’s” computer screen bares a fair resemblance to Mickey’s photo. Crop it to match the wide-screen format of The Monkey’s Mask, darken her hair and add a similarly cropped shot of Fuhrman holding a photo of his wife as he packs for his trip to Connecticut. You get Fuhrman thinking about his wife the way Jill thinks about Diana. As you will see with photos of murder victims in Twin Peaks and the pilot TV episode of Robocop, “Martha’s” photo has to do triple duty, which makes the resemblance more remarkable. You can do it with somebody who looks like Maggie Grace but not with somebody who looks like Martha Moxley.  

A few other things about The Monkey’s Mask that I didn’t pay much conscious attention to the first time made me remember why I hadn’t noticed them. I snoozed through most of the movie. That wasn’t the movie’s fault; it was mine. I wasn’t in the mood for an original, intellectual character study. When you I put my brain in gear full time I saw many interesting things that weren’t apparent the first time I saw the movie. I saw that the explicit sex, language and nudity were essential to the plot. They are clues to the thrill motive for Mickey’s murder and red herrings at the same time. You have to see everything in context to separate the red herrings on the surface from the clues beneath them.  

Jill goes to Diana’s kitchen in only her white undershirt not realizing that Nick is home. He casually asks her if she had a good night with his wife. Jealousy clearly has nothing to do with Mickey’s murder if Nick or Diana is involve. Jill suspects neither of them because she thinks the killer is an older male poet. Diana is and older female poet. Nick is ten years younger than Diana and he is no poet. Nick is looking at a newspaper. Jill sarcastically asks him if he is looking for a picture of himself. The key image in this short sequence is not Jill’s frontal nudity but a frame of her pulling up her dark pants and turning around. The key verbal exchange is when Nick tells Jill that he loves “to destroy brain dead cops in the witness box.”  

Jill knows that Nick has no sympathy for victims of violent crimes and she can’t understand Diana’s cold reaction to learning that dogs mutilated Mickey’s body. In Murder in Greenwich, you see “Martha’s body” with her pants pulled halfway down her thighs exposing her buttocks. You see a dog sniffing at her corpse. In the book, Martha was wearing a pink coat and lying on her side. In the movie her corpse wears dark pants and a white sweater under a blue coat and lies on her stomach. Take away Martha’s jacket and you have Jill’s white top, blue jean pants and bare buttocks exposed to a killer.  

An actress can show her naked butt on American commercial television as long as she is pretending to be the victim of a savage assault. In this case it serves to punch up Fuhrman’s conjecture that Martha’s killer pulled down her pants to humiliate her after killing her in a jealous rage. As Steve Carroll drives Fuhrman and Weeks in his old station wagon past the place where Martha’s friend Sheila “Leguire” found her body, Fuhrman calls the investigating officers “brain dead assholes.” Carroll was one of the investigating officers. In The Monkey’s Mask, former police officer Jill Fitzpatrick drives a new station wagon.  As a lesbian, you can see how easy it is to morph her character into the part of a man.

None of this was in my consciousness when I took a break from the wet pavement, the eggs, the mailbox, the picture window, the “Hacker,” the red dress and Hildegarde Withers to watch The Monkey’s Mask. After seeing the unexpected links to Murder in Greenwich, I realized that Jill’s leather jacket alone wasn’t what led me to it. It was the combination of Jill’s jacket and Diana’s red sweater as they share a drink in Diana’s penthouse as a prelude to making love. This is the last frame of a slow camera pan from a doll in the rain-streaked picture window and knickknacks, including an ostrich egg, on a shelf. In Murder in Greenwich the mannequins wear read cloth Fuhrman wears the leather jacket. Kelly is his little blonde daughter.  

Kelly McGillis is Diana. She is the Amish mother in Witness with Josef Sommer, the air combat expert in Top Gun with Meg Ryan, and the plaintiff’s lawyer in The Accused with Jodie Foster. She is a blacklisted photojournalist in The House on Carroll Street with Kenneth Walsh. Actors she appeared with in movies other than The Monkey’s Mask link to everything that came out of The Rosary Murders, D.O.A, Taxi Driver and Twin Peaks and went into Murder in Greenwich.  

Kelly McGillis associations lead inevitably to trains, buses, baseball, witch-hunts and priests. The buses eventually lead to New York, Los Vegas, Detroit and Oz. Native Detroiter and Los Vegas headliner Diana Ross is Dorothy, a New York City schoolteacher in The Wiz (’78) with Michael Jackson as the Scarecrow. She makes all the stops on the way to Oz where Fuhrman appears to have landed in a hot air balloon speaking behind the masks of several male and female characters. He appears to be what Earl Holliman as Talbot Scott in The Power (’68) with George Hamilton, Suzanne Pleshette and Barbara Nichols calls himself, “a manufactured personality.”    

You’ll find other people’s stories about the young Mark Fuhrman doing his racist “act” in blackface on Halloween, harassing black families and using the n-word the way he used them on the McKinny tapes. You’ll find allegations that his mother Billie was a coarse, profane and abusive alcoholic. You’ll find a story about young Mark threatening to kill one of his mother’s male callers with a shotgun. He says his mother overprotected him. He says that his father was a liar and a drunk who abandoned his family when Mark was seven years old. The stories Fuhrman said he invented or exaggerated to shock or impress Laura Hart and to anger Natalie Singer do not explain the stories he doesn’t tell, the stories about himself before he joined the LAPD.  

The only Fuhrman you see from his perspective is a combination of characters from the movies. He’s Joe Friday, Frank Columbo, Dirty Harry, Popeye Doyle, Sam Spade, Phillip Marlow, and Mike Hammer. Martha’s friend was Sheila McGuire. Barbara Leguire is a character in a Mike Hammer episode. Barbara is the name of Fuhrman’s first wife. Sometimes Fuhrman is David Addison, Remington Steele, Hercule Poirot, Jessica Fletcher and Hildegarde Withers. There doesn’t seem to be a real Mark Fuhrman apart from how other people describe him. You have to look for pieces of Fuhrman in the movies. Look for aspects of him in his version of other people like Michael Skakel and O.J. Simpson. Note the symbolism he uses to separate them and to fuse them. 

A curious Murder in Greenwich movie deviation from the book is how the City of Detroit disappears overtly but not subliminally. When Fuhrman gets off the train and meets Stephan Weeks the operative passage is where Weeks says, “My Yankees are two games up; I’m happy.” No conversation remotely similar to this took place in the book. The bus reflected in the train window as Weeks mentions the Yankees is an unmistakable reference to Fuhrman’s city attorney report on O.J. smashing the window of his Mercedes Benz (MB) with a baseball bat. The Naked Gun 2 ½ gives you a link to O.J., a bus and Detroit. You will see the bus reflection in the Greenwich train window again only when Fuhrman and Weeks greet Michael Baden (MB) stepping off the train. 

In his book, Fuhrman says he got to Greenwich in September ’97. In the movie, the calendar on the parole office wall says October. If you know anything about baseball you know that Weeks could be talking only about the New York Yankees lead in the Word Series. The bus reflected in the train window is an oblique reference to O.J., the 1984 baseball bat incident on Rockingham and O.J.’s roles in The Naked Gun 2 ½, Detour to Terror and The Cassandra Crossing. Here is a great example of how much information can be packed into one image – which was Fuhrman’s explanation for keeping the political cartoon of a Nazi swastika on his police office desk…. 

O.J. gets trapped under a bus bound for Detroit in The Naked Gun 2 ½. The idea probably came from a cross between his role as a bus driver in Detour to Terror and a scene set in Detroit in Bird on a Wire with Mel Gibson using phony legs under a car to pull a sadistic practical joke on his boss. In The Cassandra Crossing, O.J. is a passenger on a train going through France with a plague-carrying stowaway aboard. Burt Lancaster is an American Army colonel determined to keep the incident secret at all cost. Other train passengers include Ava Gardner as a super-wealthy woman named Nicole and Martin Sheen as a drug trafficker posing as her gigolo. Nicole has a dog with her on the train named Iago. Sophia Loren is a best selling author. O.J. is an atheistic Interpol agent posing as a priest.   

Lancaster is a name in a Detroit Catholic News obituary in The Rosary Murders with Donald Southerland as a priest and Josef Summer as a cop.  

In my Iago in Brentwood research I learned enough about Fuhrman to guess that he was a heavy sports gambler. The changed month on the Murder in Greenwich movie calendar plus the Weeks-Fuhrman train station meeting suggests that I guessed right.  

Michael Jordan got a slap on the wrist for gambling on basketball games. Pete Rose was excluded from the Hall of Fame for gambling on baseball games although he never bet against his team. His Cincinnati Reds beat the Yankees in the ’78 World Series under manager George “Sparky” Anderson. Anderson’s Detroit Tigers beat the San Diego Padres in the ’84 World Series. Heavy beating on championship sporting event is what the ’84 Tigers, George Foreman, Michael Jordan and Larry Bird have in common. It is likely that Fuhrman visited O.J.’s Rockingham estate in October 1984 after the World Series where he said the baseball bat incident made an indelible impression on his mind. I’m sure it did. But not for the reason he stated in his 1989 letter to the city attorney.  

Fuhrman shared that unforgettable experience with no one until he wrote the letter. He was hazy about the time. He wrote that it happened in the fall or winter of 1985. It happened in the fall of ’84. The World Series begins in October and October is clearly a special month for Fuhrman. I was betting that it had something to do with annual events like the World Series and his childhood experiences with Devil’s Night and Halloween. I was betting that it had a lot to do with autumn leaves, arson, the City of Detroit, The Wizard of Oz and his mother Billie.  

When I see an actor or character from Detroit or a series of movie scenes set in Detroit, I look for a hitman, a conflagration, an elevator, a train and a bus. I usually see all five. This narrow search works both ways. When I see at least four of those items without seeing an obvious reference to Detroit, I look for one. That’s how I learned that Sherilyn Fenn was from Detroit when I saw Diary of a Hitman. When Twin Peaks introduced Daniel O’Herlihy, the “old man” in Robocop with Ronny Cox, it called up images of Robocop 2 with Belinda Baur, the Detroit Free Press reporter in The Rosary Murders. That’s how it is with free association. Reach for one and you automatically get others.  

I saw no buses in Twin Peaks but I did see a train, an elevator, a big fire and a hitman. I thought I had “the” Detroit link with the man who buys the city in Robocop. I also thought I had the Wizard of Oz link in Twin Peaks writer and director David Lynch’s Wild at Heart. Although Piper Laurie’s character in Twin Peaks gets caught in a fire, I did not make the Detroit connection to her until I checked her biography. I saw that she was born in Detroit. I also saw that she is Aunt Em in Return to Oz. The first time you see Aunt Em with Dorothy she is dipping eggs in a pan of water and drying them with a cloth.  

Okay. We’ve got the water and the eggs. Where is the mailbox? Where is the red dress? Where is the hacker? You’ll see them in the next chapter.

Return to Oz was full of surprises for me. It was filmed in England, the home of the bell tower that houses the clock in Greenwich. Fairuza Balk was a terrific little actress. I’d never heard of her. There was no singing and dancing, no Good Witch of the South, no Munchkins, very little Toto and some great new characters.  It was a good movie – too good for kids. If any studio other than Disney had released it, I’m sure that more people would have watched it. I couldn’t even recall hearing of it.  

I didn’t see as many links to Fuhrman in Return to Oz that I expected when my focus was on his part in the Bundy murders. That state of affairs changed with my shift of focus to Murder in Greenwich….  

My first impression of Fuhrman driving up to his farm in Idaho was a total disconnect from how I picture his pickup truck and his farm. In his second television interview with Diane Sawyer his truck was brownish yellow. The camera showed only part of it but it looked much older than the 1970 Ford pickup he described in his book. In the movie it was blue. 

My second impression was how much the herd of sheep reminded me of the woman in Silver Steak who wore a jacket like Fuhrman’s and buzzed a herd of sheep in a biplane. More about that later…  

My third impression was that Fuhrman’s 1997 movie farm “in Idaho,” minus the sheep, looked a lot like a cleaned up version of Dorothy’s 1899 farm “in Kansas.”  

I couldn’t tell whether the wooden structure that Fuhrman’s kids in Murder in Greenwich were playing near as he entered the gate was a chicken coup or a rabbit pen. I figured that it was supposed to represent both because in Murder in Brentwood Fuhrman wrote, “The kids raise their own rabbits and chickens and sell the eggs. At the last county fair, my daughter won a blue ribbon for her eggs and my son won a blue ribbon for his rabbit named Cookie.” He said that his daughter was 5 ½ and his son was 3 ½. In the movie, the children look two years younger.  I suspect that you don’t see rabbits or chickens in that scene because the kids weren’t used to them and they were frightened. Keep in mind that Christopher Meloni was a prisoner in Oz.

In 2002 Fuhrman’s real daughter would have been about the age Dorothy was supposed to be in Return to Oz. Dorothy running to show her Aunt Em the “Oz” key that she found reminded me of Fuhrman’s screen daughter running to greet Christopher Meloni as Mark Fuhrman when he gets out of his truck. You don’t see his truck key but you know that it was one of the last things he touched before he hoisted the kids and said, “What did you bring me? What did you bring me?” During Mark Fuhrman’s search of the “Juice’s” Rockingham home, he said he found a key to O.J.’s study.  

The next two scenes combined last 87 seconds. Before you get to that, you need to know that Egg is the name of a boy in The Hotel New Hampshire who goes to a watery grave in a plain crash over the Atlantic. 

Fuhrman is sitting at a table with his wife Caroline and their kids. You hear a dog barking in the background. Caroline doesn’t want him to go to Greenwich. While she fusses over the kids, telling her daughter not to blow bubbles in her milk and wiping her son’s mouth with a cloth, she reminds Mark that he is going to be an electrician. Then you see Fuhrman in his study gathering press clippings as he prepares for his trip. Caroline gives in. If you read the book you know that he is doing all of this for Martha’s mother Dorothy. 

In Return to Oz Aunt Em and Uncle Henry have a disagreement over sending Dorothy away to see a special doctor. Henry doesn’t want her to leave the farm. He looks at an ad clipped from a newspaper about a doctor named J.B. Worley who promises “Electric Healing!” Aunt Em hopes that he can cure Dorothy of her sleeplessness and delusions of Oz. Uncle Henry is skeptical but eventually gives in.  

This scene immediately precedes the one where Dorothy uncovers the key to something in Oz. When Aunt Em takes Dorothy away in an old wagon, Toto trots after them. He barks but he can’t come with them. Remind you of anything in Murder in Greenwich?

In the book, Fuhrman says that Steve Carroll drove a pickup truck. In the movie, Carroll drives only an old wagon. When he drops Fuhrman and Weeks off at their motel he has a tiff with Fuhrman, points to the ’97 Pontiac he is going to be using and says, “The keys are on the seat.”  

Weeks shows Fuhrman a newspaper with his picture and O.J.’s (a.k.a. “the Juice”) on the front page. The headline is not flattering. He tosses the paper into a trash barrel on top of burning fall leaves. In the background you can see the styled-steel wheel of his car. I won’t say here why I thought it was important to study wheels in Murder in Greenwich because it isn’t relevant here. The relevant point is that I expected some wheel designs to have a special meaning to Fuhrman. The shot of the Pontiac wheel comes ten seconds after Carroll tells Fuhrman that his keys are on the seat. Where Sleeping Dogs Lie (’92) fits right into this sequence but it has far to many links to Fuhrman that go in other directions to mention here.   

In Return to Oz Dr. J.B. Worley turns out to be a quack. His head nurse looks and acts like a wicked witch. They give Dorothy’s Aunt Em a story that sounds great and Aunt Em leaves Dorothy in their care. The head nurse comes to Dorothy’s room with an orderly pushing a gurney on long legs and big wheels. They strap Dorothy to the gurney and wheel her into the treatment room. The doctor puts electrodes on her head and adjusts his machine. Just as he is about to “turn on the juice,” an electrical storm cuts off the power. Dorothy and a mysterious new friend escape from the clinic in a drenching rain with the head nurse in hot pursuit. The girls plunge into a river with a swift current. Dorothy pulls herself into a floating playpen but her new friend sinks under the water.

Dorothy falls asleep. When she wakes up she’s in Oz with her chicken Billina who can now talk. The Emerald City is in ruins and everyone appears to have turned to stone. Odd, four-legged creatures with heads like the orderly and wheels for feet chase Dorothy. She escapes into a rock that opens the door to a cavern using the key she found on her farm. The “Wheelers’” wheels don’t look like the wheels on the gurney. They do look like the wheels on Fuhrman’s Pontiac.

The original Wizard of Oz featured Billie Burk as Glenda, the Good Witch of the North. I knew that the name Billie meant an awful lot to Mark Fuhrman because it was his mother’s name and because it appeared so often in movies that were linked to Mark Fuhrman. When I made the Wizard of Oz connection to “Billie” in Sergeant Rutledge I also noticed a “one-eye link” to Mark Fuhrman in a dozen movies including The Wiz and Congo. Diana Ross, who is Dorothy in The Wiz is Billie Holliday in Lady Sings the Blues. Ernie Hudson is the English safari guide in Congo where a chimpanzee’s paintings of a rain forest and one eye lead an unlikely team to a lost city. Hudson is the warden in OZ.   

When I saw Christopher Meloni on the beginning credits of Murder in Greenwich followed by Robert Forster I didn’t make the Return to Oz or the American Perfekt connection to Fairuza Balk. It snuck up on me with the CBS eye on the television van, the Hildy Southerlyn character, the rain and Fuhrman’s brown leather jacket, blue jeans and cowboy boots. I saw that costume on lead characters in I Come in Peace, Overboard and Servants of Twilight. In American Perfekt, Fairuza Balk as Alice also wears that costume. She’s wearing it when she hitches a ride with a trucker.  

Fuhrman makes so much of the Skakel family’s relationship to the Kennedys that Christopher Meloni and Robert Forster’s characters sometimes used the names Skakel and Kennedy interchangeably. It’s hard not to think of this when Fairuza Balk as Alice the hitchhiker meets Robert Forster as Jake the homicidal psychiatrist in American Perfekt. He flips a Kennedy silver dollar that rolls off his table and keeps rolling until it reaches Alice’s boot. She stomps on it.  

We’re not finished with the mailbox, the water, the eggs and the red dress in Murder in Greenwich. You saw how the eggs and water connect to Fairuza Balk in Return to Oz. I promised you that you would see the mailbox and the red dress in the next chapter. Look for Fairuza Balk and Nastassja Kinski wearing red in Red Letters (2000). It won’t be hard.