Go to
Chapter 30

Table of Contents

Chapter 29

Murder 101

The number 101 appeared so frequently in the Fuhrman collection that I knew it had to mean something. At first I thought it was a variation of the number 11. Then I noticed it in association with the U.S. Army’s 101 Airborne Division but not often enough or in a context drawn tightly enough to make a strong connection to Mark Fuhrman and the Bundy murders. To soldiers and marines the difference is big. The Army is not the Marine Corps. Lee Marvin, an ex-marine playing a soldier in the Army’s 1^st Division is the kind of strong connection I’m talking about.

In Country with Bruce Willis and Stephen Tobolowski was the closest I came to seeing a 101 link (The Screaming Eagles) to Fuhrman. Tobolowski is Pete, a former combat soldier in the 101^st. He organizes the dance for Vietnam vets attended by soldiers and marines alike. I saw Tobolowski in several movies by way of bird links (In Country, Bird on a Wire), name links (Ryerson in Groundhog Day, Myerson in Single White Female), doctor links (Basic Instinct) and time travel links (The Philadelphia Experiment). The more of him I saw the less I came to see the 101 link as predominantly related to bird or military themes and more to the lessons Fuhrman learned from the movies that Tobolowski appeared in.

The light didn’t go on for me until I turned to Court TV recently and saw a promo for a 1991 made-for-television movie called Murder 101. I saw it when it first aired but none of my digging for 101 links brought it to mind. That’s Functional Fixedness at work—the psychological quirk we are all subject to that limits our ability to see alternate solutions to a problem once we have seen enough clues to reach a familiar conclusion. Functional Fixedness is why frame-ups don’t have to be perfect to work. It’s why the particular clues left behind at Bundy and Rockingham—supplemented by what Fuhrman said about them—worked so well against O.J. We have seen them before, again and again, in the movies.

As an art student enrolled at a nearby college in the early ’80s, Fuhrman had to know that a college curse that introduces the student to a subject or one that consists of only one class carries the suffix 101. I was sure that the connection I was looking for involved the college course in creative writing that Laura Hart taught in North Carolina. After awhile, I thought that what I had with the University of North Carolina link in Bedroom Window and the college professor links in Brotherhood of the Bell and D.O.A. were all I would find in the 101 network.

You’d think that once I realized Murder 101 was an obvious link in the 101 network I would recall who the killer was even though I hadn’t seen the movie in nearly nine years. I didn’t. It wasn’t my fault. With all the time I spent working on the Bundy case I couldn’t ignore the importance of the timeline and the blood evidence in exonerating Simpson. Nine seconds after the killer was supposed to have stabbed Mark Taylor’s character Henry Potter to death on stage and pushed his body into the arms of the innocent Professor Charlie Lattimore, he shows up neat and clean on the opposite end of a theater about 50 yards away. That’s half the distance of a football field.

When the double doors open he’s standing there ahead of two uniformed police officers. You glimpse his black leather gloves as he pulls the doors open. Assuming he ran all the way and no one noticed what direction he came from, and assuming that the officers fell in behind him when he got to the door, the timing still doesn’t work. Assuming that the side door to the stage was only a step away and the door was already open—without letting in any light—he had at least two corners to turn. He had to start at zero, accelerate to full speed (assuming he accelerates very quickly and runs very fast) then decelerate, come to a walk before turning the second corner, turn again and come to a complete halt before pulling the doors open with his bloody gloves. No way.

The makers of Murder 101 cheated, thus violating one rule of mystery writing that Charlie gives to his creative writing class. He tells them not to save all of the revelations for the last page, but sprinkle enough clues along the way that the readers are both surprised at the answer and surprised that they didn’t think of it. The way he accomplishes that is by planting red herrings (false clues) in subplots to draw the reader’s attention away from what is relevant to solving the crime. A red herring’s close resemblance to a relevant piece of evidence is what makes it so attractive to pursue. It’s the old Functional Fixedness trap that Charlie alluded to in his first lesson—the one that kept me from seeing his class as the main nerve cell in the Fuhrman collection’s 101 links.

Charlie begins his first lesson by asking if anyone in his class has ever murdered someone. When he gets the expected silence in response he asks if anyone in the class has ever thought of killing someone.

Charlie is a teacher with a flair for the dramatic. He understands human psychology well enough to know that the answer is yes and goads a student named John into showing that he is capable of such thoughts by singling him out and making fun of his black beret. He phrases his remarks so that he can be sure of getting the answer he wants. John lowers his glasses and hints that he is having thoughts of killing Charlie.

The real purpose of the confrontation is for Charlie to show that he is truly a master of his craft by demonstrating how well he can get into John’s head. Getting into the heads of the readers well enough to send them off on the wrong track is the real lesson he wants to teach. That is, he wants to teach his class how to manipulate the reader the way he manipulated John. Their confrontation is one of the red herrings that the writer of Murder 101 uses to make John a possible suspect based on noting more than his stereotypical demeanor and mode of dress. He’s the kind of guy that many of us would have no trouble seeing as a psycho who might actually kill someone over an incident like that.

Depending on who you are, you will see different possibilities in that situation. Look at it from the perspective of an ex-marine who has already decide to frame O.J. for murder with Nicole’s brand of shoes, gloves like the ones she recently bought in New York, and lots of blood. Because Charlie is a professor, a professor is a Ph.D, and a Ph.D makes him a doctor, John’s beret together with O.J.’s appearance on the docks in The Naked Gun and The Naked Gun 2 ½ could give you another idea.

An ex-marine like Mark Fuhrman had to know that the Army Rangers represent an elite military unit, distinguished by its black beret—and its proficiency in silent kills. In The Package, with Gene Hackman as Sgt. John Gallager, Army Green Berets, also noted for their proficiency in silent kills, wear black knit caps in the field. In Frogmen, Navy SEALs must have worn them, too. The question of why Fuhrman kept calling the blue knit cap on Bundy a black one long after its color was clearly established thus becomes less and less of a mystery with each revelation of core links in the Fuhrman movie collection.

Charlie uses his staged confrontation with John as a launching pad to get his Murder 101 course off the ground. He pulls from a bag a pistol, a bottle of poison (D.O.A.) and a French garrote (Cape Fear). He offers two quotes on writing, then puts a guillotine on the table, pulling his hand away from the blade as though he has accidentally cut himself. He says, "A thriller is a piece of writing whose plot development depends on violence." He follows that quote with this one: A writer is at his most capable and confident when he deals with things which are familiar to him." This is where he sets up the guillotine. "Absentmindedly" allowing his fingers to rest in the neck port, he sounds as though he is about to expound on the contradiction of people who have never killed writing about killing (a highlight of the McKinney tapes was Fuhrman claiming he had killed). Suddenly, the blade comes down chopping off three fingers—but not his fingers.

For a moment it looks as though the "absent minded professor" has really severed his fingers. Then he holds up the prop hand and says, "Charlie Lattimore’s rule number 1: A mystery writer must be like a magician (Fuhrman’s magic show). Always keep the reader thinking about the inconsequential (how did O.J.’s blood get on Bundy and in the Bronco if he wasn’t there?) while taking his mind off the big picture (when did ‘the magician’ switch the blood sample?)."

He waves the fake hand and collects the fake fingers. "As the course goes on we will learn all the tricks of the trade…Another quote. ‘Plots, maguffins, and such are like carpentry. Making a wood cabinet into a work of art is something the carpenter cannot be taught.’ As writers, you have to get into the heads of each of your characters. In a mystery story that means understanding not just the victim of the crime, but the killer."

Watching the movie, you may have noticed that the "fight" involving the cap in Murder 101 is not the only prop in the classroom with a counterpart in Fuhrman’s Murder in Brentwood. Your powers of recall may be further enhanced by the glasses that Charlie takes off as he concludes his demonstration. Remember, Fuhrman’s printed notes are in the book, including the one about a possible gunshot wound. Two views of Nicole’s body are there as well as two pictures of him pointing to the glove, his poison pen letter to the city attorney and his "hypothesis of murder." Mark this page, you may want to refer to it from time to time.

Murder 101 features a scene in which an insanely jealous woman named Ann (Virginia Madsen in Moonlighting) pulls a butcher knife on her lover (Virginia Madsen in Candyman) before he accidentally stabs her to death. According to Fuhrman’s scenario, Nicole saw an insanely jealous O.J. shortly after 10 o’clock dressed like a hit man in a B-movie. She got a butcher knife to keep him out of the house but left the house without it. O.J. lost his composure and beat her to the ground. Just then, Ron Goldman surprised O.J. and O.J. knew he had to kill both of them to protect his image. Fuhrman theorized from the evidence he found and interpreted, in his own special way, that O.J. pulled out a knife and cut Ron badly, while Nicole lay unconscious.

As the two men struggled, Ron pulled off O.J.’s black knit cap and left-hand glove. Fuhrman says that O.J. accidentally cut one of his exposed fingers with his blade (Charlie’s guillotine demonstration) before cutting Ron’s throat. Nicole woke up and tried to fight him off leaving cuts in her hand before looking him in eye as he cut her throat.

Fuhrman says in Murder in Brentwood that O.J. left behind the glasses that brought Ron to Bundy, a bloody fingerprint, and a trail of blood. He dropped a stick from an alley near Bundy on the parkway of his front lawn when his Bronco came to a sudden stop at an extreme angle to the curb. He dropped his other glove behind Kato’s wall. He left blood on the maid’s light switch before looking at himself in the mirror. He took off his shoes at his front door, showered, dressed and left his socks on the rug between his bed and his fireplace. In Murder 101 glasses are on a rug in one scene and socks are on a floor in another. In yet another scene, a man is murdered with a knife. The killer is a sharp-dressing police detective named Mike who seems to have an airtight alibi. When you put the scenes together, what do you get?

Maybe this will help….

Charlie ends his first class by handing out an assignment. His student’s are to plan a perfect murder in 10 pages or less (the length of a book proposal) in which the student is the killer. "To throw off the police you should have an airtight alibi as well as an alternative suspect who can take the blame for your actions." Fuhrman did not have an airtight alibi, only the appearance of one and the clues left at Bundy and Rockingham pointed first to O.J. If the frame-up was discovered, either Ron Shipp or Brian Kato Kaelin were in line to take the fall. Mark Fuhrman was perfectly positioned to be the hero who solved the murder in either event.

Charlie’s final quote: "The poet W. H. Alden clamed there was no such thing as the perfect murder. He said, ‘Guilt, man’s need to atone, was the traitor within the gates that would always give him away.’ But who knows. Maybe the guy was wrong." When a student asks if Alden would consider all the unsolved murders committed every year perfect murders Charlie says, "No, just sloppy detective work. Alden’s point was that no matter how small there was always a calling card left behind. It just took a good pair of eyes to find it." Nobody had as good a pair of eyes within the gates of Bundy or Rockingham as Mark Fuhrman did—or as many things in common with the characters in Murder 101.

A student named Francesca brings up a point about Charlie’s eyes and a killer’s calling card from a real murder case he was involved in. A doctor called Tim Ryder was convicted of murdering his wife Ann largely on the basis of Charlie’s testimony. The case made national headlines. That’s how Charlie and Ryder met. When Ryder was arrested Charlie decided to write a book about the case and became friendly with the accused doctor. That friendship made him privy to files in which he spotted a stolen autopsy report that would have allowed Ryder to duplicate the wounds to his wife’s hands. In the Bundy killings, Nicole had so-called defensive wounds in her hands. In Murder 101, the wounds are pentagrams (like the one Charlotte Rampling wears around her neck in Angel Heart) carved into the hands of the victims by Satan worshipers in other killings. The killer, using rubber gloves dipped in the victims blood, printed the message, "Satan Lives" on her door to implicate the Satanists.

The only printed message on the Bundy murder scene was in Mark Fuhrman’s notebook. All of the detectives carried rubber gloves.

As bad luck would have it for the killer in Murder 101 police in another state had the Satan worshipers when Ann Ryder was killed so the police knew that her killer had to be someone with access to evidence known only to the police, the coroner and himself. To almost everyone’s way of thinking the stolen report about the pentagrams in Dr. Ryder’s possession could only mean that he was the killer. That is the story Charlie tells in his book Family Man. The lead detective in the case was Mike Dowling. At Charlie’s Family Man book signing Dowling points out a minor discrepancy in the book involving the nickname "Dapper Dowling." He does dress well (like Mark Fuhrman) but indicates that the name is Charlie’s invention. So was the man Charlie made Ryder out to be once he saw the planted autopsy reports.

Henry Potter (one letter removed from Porter) also attends the book signing. He’s the guy who gets stabbed in the wings of the college theater. He is also seeing Charlie’s estranged wife Laura (where have you heard that name before?). Laura is also a writing teacher. Henry compares Family Man unfavorably to Charlie’s fiction. When Charlie says, "We all can’t be Shakespeare," Henry (Mark Taylor) says, "What the hell. The money’s good, right. Paperback rights, mini series down the line."

Francesca Lavin, the murder-victim-to-be, is also present at the book signing. When she tells Mike that she has enrolled in Charlie’s creative writing class, The Art of the Thriller, his lack of enthusiasm prompts her to say, "You don’t seem to think much of crime writers." He replies, "Well, it’s just that they fail to realize most people get murdered right in their own living room and usually by someone very close to them. I mean, no grand schemes, no premeditation, just the heat of the moment." Charlie uses that line to make his exit. He says, "I’m happy to leave real life murders up to you. Give me the fictional kind any day of the week.

The Bundy killer gave us both because he knew that fictional detective Mike Dowling was expressing the real attitude of homicide detectives with the experience of the men who "followed his footsteps" to O.J. The more convoluted the plan the better because the likelihood of a professional law enforcement officer taking it seriously diminished exponentially with each convolution. Like Joubert said in Three Days of the Condor, "Professionals are predictable." As Laura said to Charlie about the reason for his affair with a student, "I teach this stuff for a living. I know these stories inside out." To these Fuhrman-like traits let us add what Francesca brings to the table in Murder 101 when Mike tells her that Charlie is married. She tells him that his wife is divorcing him (like Dex’s wife in D.O.A). Mike takes a hard look at her and tells her that she does her homework. She replies, "Just enough to know the professor’s strengths." Mike adds, "And his weakness."

Charlie’s weakness is beautiful young women like Francesca. Does that sound anything like O.J? Because Murder 101 was made for commercial television the writers and directors could go only so far in showing or describing the specifics of Charlie’s sexual indiscretion. However, the final scene of the movie where Dye Young as Laura flubs her line about Meryl Streep playing her in Robert Miner’s screenplay, the action board tells you plenty about Nicole’s sex life from her killer’s point of view.

The board is divided into seven blocks. Assuming that Murder 101 made the kind of impression on Nicole’s killer that I think it did, the title block is self-explanatory. Buy a stretch you can see 100 as one fifty dollar bill apiece for O.J. and Nicole (Ulysses Simpson Grant) or Nicole and Grant Kramer, the man she was dating when she met Kato.

The stretch gets shorter when you see it through the eyes of someone obsessed with the Simpsons and you see that the first name in the block below the one hundred is Bill. Ben Franklin and his experiment with electricity and the key (The Juice) will work, too. But the real key to Ben Franklin’s importance to the killer—if he was a history buff like Mark Fuhrman—is the fact that Franklin is synonymous with the hundred-dollar bill and two things that begin with the letter "A." He was the first United States Ambassador to France. He printed, sold and made a ton of money on a book—The Ben Franklin Almanac.

Remember the lengths to which the murdered girl was willing to go to get an A in Charlie’s class and the relationship that Charlie had with Laura and how much the name Sarah has in common with Laura. The "A" could just as easily stand for the mark that Rae Dawn Chong as Sarah Jane Walker has to get on her final paper in Soul Man (’86) to pass a college course in criminal law. Chong sits next to the actor in The Hitcher (’86) with Jennifer Jason Leigh as Nash and Rutger Hauer as John Ryder the killer who frames him for murder. Right, a combination of John with the beret and the glasses and Dr. Ryder, the man the killer frames for murder.

The actor is Jim (O.J.’s middle name) in The Hitcher. In Soul Man he’s Mark. He drives a SUV and plays basketball. You see him briefly in a black beret and glasses. In another scene you see him in gloves and a ski mask to hide his color. He’s Rae Dawn Chong’s real life husband-to-be C. Thomas Howell. His character, Mark, poses as a black man to get a scholarship to Harvard when his wealthy father decides to transfer the money for law school to a time share in a condominium. Mark has dinner with the parents of a white girl named Whitney Dunbar. Mrs. Dunbar sees him as a savage with a knife in his teeth who can think of nothing but raping white women including her (O.J.’s alleged motive for killing Nicole). Mr. Dunbar (Leslie Nielsen) sees him as an abusive, controlling, heroin-addicted pimp and his daughter as the pimp’s slavish, very pregnant, emotional punching bag.

Nicole was in the late stages of pregnancy when Fuhrman was a narcotics cop and said in his ’89 report to the city attorney that he witnessed O.J. talking like the pimp Mr. Dunbar imagines in Soul Man.

Soul Man was directed by Steven Miner, who also directed the slasher flick Friday the 13^th Part 3 (’82) with Tracie Savage. Savage got her start in broadcasting at WJBK-TV in Detroit. She was the reporter for KNBC News in Los Angeles who gave the test results on the socks that Fuhrman said he found on O.J.’s bedroom rug before the test was made.

Remember the TV reporter named Tracy in Future World? Remember Bridget (Single White Female) Fonda’s father Peter as Charlie nicknaming her Socks? What then do you make of "Mark’s" socks on his rug in Soul Man where he plants his feet—feet that point straight ahead like Orenthal James Simpson’s, Leslie Nielsen’s and Mark Fuhrman’s? Steven Miner gives you all of those links to Fuhrman. That’s Steven Miner. Robert Miner is the white character in Murder 101 who figures out who killed his Aunt and framed his Uncle Tim. That’s Dr. Ryder to us, not John Ryder the mad slasher in The Hitcher. Bob Minor is the black actor playing the assassin in Action Jackson who dresses like Jackson to frame him for murder. Paul Minor is the former FBI polygraph expert who cleared Fuhrman of charges that he framed O.J. Are these names, roles and situations starting to run together? At some point they have to.

Flip back to the action board in Murder 101 for a minute. In the name block with Bill Condon is Stephen Katz. You’ve seen where Steven fits in the Fuhrman collection with actor Steven Tobolowski and director Steven Miner. You know how the musical Cats is linked to Moonlighting’s "Next stop Murder" and Ghost. Katz is one letter away from Kato. The date below the name block, 12-17-90, is one day away from the day Nicole purchased the Aris Light gloves. 12 is the exact day she was killed. 17 is the day her daughter Sydney was born (birthday and death day on tombstone—Dean Jagger, the "cat in the hat," born July 26, died Feb 5. Helen Mirren, who wore the dead woman’s shoes, born July 26). The 93 next to the 100 is the year that Nicole called 911 claiming that O.J. broke through a French door and that she was terrified he was going to give her a savage beating. She referred to O.J.’s record, which would not have existed without Mark Fuhrman’s letter. She was 34 years old. On that tape O.J. talked loud. He used explicit language and he made serious accusations but no threats. Kato was in the house at the time.

The ’93 911 tape gave one more reason for the killer to take a special interest in Sydney Simpson. She was there, too. She heard what her mother said and what her father said. She alone knows what she saw. That’s what O.J. was ranting about. He was afraid that his children might see what he saw in 1992. He saw Nicole performing oral sex on Keith Zlomsowitch, a man he came to believe was involved in drugs and prostitution, using the restaurant he managed as a front.

Nothing that explicit could have been shown in Murder 101. It could be shown in To Protect and Serve (’92) where you see a black pimp in the back seat of a white cop’s squad car calling himself a "player." Charlie Stewart, the cop in the front seat, tells him that he’d better start "moonlighting at McDonalds or somethin’" to make his payments. Charlie looks like he’s having a heart attack as the pimp hands him an envelope. He seems to recover. A woman’s head then rises into the picture. Her lipstick is smeared. She wipes her mouth on his necktie and leaves with the pimp (Fuhrman spread rumors that he was having sex with Nicole and he made a point of wearing and modeling an expensive tie on the Bundy crime scene). Charlie counts the money in the envelope. You see three bills but you can see only the denomination of the bill on top. You see the back of the bill but you know it’s the one that features an engraving of Ulysses Simpson Grant on the front.

Charlie the cop will soon die of a gunshot wound (Fuhrman’s third note at the Bundy crime scene). Other cops will force the pimp to give himself a lethal dose of cocaine (Fuhrman was a narcotics cop). Note that the transaction in the squad car makes the car a crime scene and the envelope containing incrimination evidence is a murder/ mystery cliché. In Murder 101 that’s what Charlie calls the note in the envelope that he leaves for Francesca before the killer strangles her with Charlie’s necktie. Note that the crime involving the envelope in To Protect and Serve has a black man witnessing the same sex act between a white man and the white woman who "belongs to him" that O.J. witnessed between Nicole and Zlomsowitch—an alleged white pimp.