Table of Contents

Chapter 11

Dead Woman's Shoes

What do Julian Sand in Warlock and Witch Hunt; Cassandra Peterson in Elvira; Helen Merrin in Excalibur and The New Twilight Zone’s Dead Woman’s Shoes have in common with Mark Fuhrman?  

If you look hard enough you can find something that anyone has in common with anyone else. But if you start with Murder in Greenwich and look only for things that had to have loomed large in Fuhrman’s mind if the Iago hypothesis is correct your options diminish dramatically. If you look for ideas that came from particular movies and TV shows, your options decrease again. Now you have to find common elements in a particular context or a particular combination that reinforce each other. Sometimes only the name or a variation of the name Chris or George will do. Sometimes you need a bird. Sometimes it has to be a black bird 

Before Murder in Greenwich, most Smoking Gun readers thought I was stretching things with the shoe heel in Elvira, the killer in his victim’s shoes in Warlock and the book motive for the killings in both movies. They though the Wizard of Oz connection to Fuhrman was in my head.  They didn’t buy the “French connections,” either, or the scores of “little things” I found that pointed to Fuhrman’s alibis, the importance of nails, red hair, or the name Cassandra. In Warlock it’s Kassandra. I hadn’t seen the Cassandra Crossing with O.J. Simpson and Bert Lancaster so I couldn’t tie it to O.J., Lancaster or Fuhrman. I didn’t even know what trains meant to Fuhrman. I just knew they showed up a lot in movies I linked to him, like ghosts, time travel and people in other people’s shoes.  

A House in the Hills has Helen Slater as a house sitter who tries on the clothes of the woman of the house, including her red jacket and her black dress shoes. Jeffery Tambor is a neighbor who tries to kill her. You get a murder victim’s shoes in Charles Beaumont’s Dead Man’s Shoes episode of The Twilight Zone. You get another murder victim’s shoes in Lynn Barker’s Dead Woman’s Shoes episode of The New Twilight Zone with Helen Mirren as Betty Duncan possessed by the spirit of Susan Montgomery. Jeffery Tambor as Susan’s lawyer husband Kyle is her killer. His law firm is Montgomery and Slater. 

You see all of the references on this page in Murder in Greenwich.

But let’s back up a little to Julian Sand as Fenn Mocha in With Hunt. To get a blonde submerged in water Marie won’t do. It has to be Kim Hunter. In the climactic scene, Fenn Mocha uses witchcraft to drown Kim instead of having Marie pretend to drown. He tells Lovecraft, “I’m a fan of old movies. I like to watch them over and over again. And there’s one I’d like to show you – only it’s not that old, only a couple of days.”  

Mocha leads Lovecraft into the bathroom of N.J. Gotlieb’s beach house. 

“Here’s my screening room.” Lovecraft sees a frozen scene of Crockett kneeling beside the bathtub about to dunk Marie in the water. Mocha unfreezes the scene with a snap of his fingers. As Mari struggles in the senator’s grasp he says, “Call me Mr. President again.”  

Mocha snaps his fingers again to freeze the image and says, “The wonderful thing about old movies is you get to recast them; like this one for instance. It wasn’t cast right. With another snap of his fingers Marie is transformed into Kim who is really struggling for her life. “That’s much better,” he says. I’ve also done a little rewrite. In the original the girl doesn’t die, but considering the new cast she will.”  

Fenn Mocha’s inspiration could have come from an earlier scene in which Kim tried to commit suicide by drowning. Lovecraft found her lying face down in the pool, jumped in and rescued her. He learns that she was not always beautiful and glamorous. She was a plain, mousy nobody until Vivian Dart transformed her. Nobody noticed the transformation because before it happened nobody noticed her. Female impersonator Vivian Dart gave her the qualities that made a star a star.  

To Fuhrman, blood and water are interchangeable, as you will see if you haven’t seen it already. In the Bundy murders the female victim was found in a pool of blood. In the Moxley murder a pool of blood near her body told Fuhrman that she must have been lying in it for a long time. Fuhrman was on the Bundy murder scene taking notes for his court appearance and his first book. In his Murder in Greenwich movie he is magically transported to the Belle Haven murder scene twenty-two years earlier. He shared the writing credits for the screenplay rewrite of his second book and got to recast the characters in his book.  

Robert Downey Jr., Alex in Chances Are, is a psychotic killer named Vivian in the 1998 movie In Dreams with Annette Bening as Claire. Vivian’s mother chained him to his bed in 1965 when the town he lived in was flooded to make an artificial lake. His mother’s body was found floating in the lake. Vivian was so screwed up that he had to be confined to a mental institution. He escaped by killing a nurse and dressing in her clothes. As an adult he sometimes dresses in his mother’s clothes. She always wore red. Her ghost haunts him in his dreams. 

Vivian keeps a tailor’s dummy draped in a red dress. His mother drowned in a red suit. He forms a psychic link with Claire, kills her daughter and husband and lures her to a cider mill where he holds a little girl named Ruby. The relationship he tries to have with Claire suggests that he had an incestuous relationship with his mother.  

I saw In Dreams after I saw Chances Are. Therefore, the incest theme in Chances Are is the main reason I linked it to Helen Mirren in Excalibur. When Alex kisses Miranda its okay. When he realizes he was Louie Jeffries in another life – and another body – it’s not okay. When she crawls naked into bed with him and he sees who she is, he is mortified. He thought she was Louie’s wife.  

Helen Mirren as Morgana, a powerful witch, crawls into her brother Arthur’s bed and seduces him by changing her outward appearance to look like Arthur’s wife. Her goal is to create an heir to his throne who will overthrow him. She names the boy born of their incestuous union Mordred. Morgana raises him to despise his father and to be as evil as the Devil. Arthur’s Camelot has fallen to ruin and as the power behind her evil son, Morgana plans to keep it that way by luring his knights of the round table in quest of the Holy Grail to their doom.

The knights in shiny armor hang from trees in the forest outside Morgana’s lair like hideous Christmas tree ornaments while crows pluck at their rotting flesh. This is Mordred and Morgana’s idea of a good time.  

Morgana happens to be the name of a powerful witch in Elvira (’88). W. Morgan Sheppard is Morgana’s warlock brother Vincent and Elvira’s uncle. He wants a book of spells that his sister Morgana left to Elvira in her will. Elvira thinks it’s a cookbook and agrees to sell it to him for fifty dollars. But her poodle, also left to her in Morgana’s will knows how valuable it is and hides it. Elvira makes several references to the Wizard of Oz. W. Moran Sheppard is indirectly one of them by way of his appearance in Wild at Heart. He also makes a direct reference to the Wicked Witch of the West by telling Elvira, “I’ll get you and your little dog, too.”

Morgan is the name Fuhrman invented in Murder in Greenwich to substitute for Terrien. Georgeanne Terrien was the sister of Ethel Kennedy and the Skakel children’s father Rushton. She was therefore the aunt of Ruston Jr., John, Thomas, Michel and Julie Skakel. The name Georgeanne also brings us to Helen Mirren and you will see that the poodle and the OZ references in Elvira are also associated with Helen Mirren’s character in The New Twilight Zone’s Dead Woman’s Shoes.

Helen Mirren is Georgina in The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover. Fuhrman also changes the real name of Martha Moxley’s friend Helen Ix to Charity Foster. Any way you look at it, Fuhrman is avoiding the real names Georgeanne and Helen but his substitutes still lead back to Helen. Helen Mirren isn’t the only Helen he wants to duck. She’s just the one we’re looking at now because of the incest and body-swapping link she represents between Chances Are and Excalibur.  

I looked for incest when I was working on the first Smoking Gun because of Fuhrman’s strong reaction on the Laura Hart McKinny tapes to her question, “What would you do if someone called you a motherfucker?” She was clearly referring to his unfortunate initials M.F. and he was clearly hypersensitive to it. I was surprised to see him suggest that something “strange” was going on between an early suspect in Martha Moxley’s murder and his mother.

As coming up with surprises is the essence of creativity and I was sure that Fuhrman had none, I wondered about this apparent contradiction. Then I picked up on the pattern he consistently used to rebut compelling evidence against him. He rewrote the characters – stereotypically.  

To prove that he wasn’t a racist after he told his LAPD psychologists that he was a violent racist and those records became public, he cultivated a few black and Hispanic “friends” in strategic places. You won’t find any of them prior to the public availability of his psychological evaluation.  He said he was “play acting” on the McKinney tapes and he said that the people who accused him of using violent racist language before the Bundy murders were either liars or people he purposely offended because they irritated him. After the Bundy murders he worked extra hard to clear a black man accused of murdering a white man and he embraced a black woman on an “impulse” of compassion when here uncle was bludgeoned to death with a hammer.    

All Fuhrman did to “prove” that he wasn’t overly sensitive about his initials was to make a point of including a suggestion of incest – specifically mother-son incest – in his movie. He could then change the real name Hammond to Mathers on the pretext that he did it to avoid a lawsuit because he used creative license with Hammond’s character to tell his story. I think he did it to avoid using a name that sounded too much like Mickey Spillain’s Mike Hammer with all of his conscious movie links to Mike Hammer as well as to blunt the M.F. sensitivity issue. A hammer as a weapon is one thing; a Hammer as a name is another. Besides, Fuhrman never does anything big for one reason.    

Dead Woman’s Shoes with Helen Mirren presents special problems. Like Ricochet or Guilty Conscience it has so many links to the Bundy murders that you might thinks all of the killers ideas came from it if you hadn’t see so much more in other movies. Through the beginning credits you see things only from Betty Duncan’s knees down as she walks to her job. You see her modest loafers, a man’s suede shoes with rubber souls, P.F. Flyers, sandals, Earth shoes, etc. You see a woman pushing a baby carriage a man carrying a boom box and a man in a wheelchair wearing Nike’s. A man in the store wears cowboy boots.

Do you think you are going to see a mannequin in a window wearing a red dress? There is no reason to expect it – no water, no mailbox, no eggs – but within two minutes you see two mannequins in the window behind a greasy-haired guy with a crucifix. It’s 1985 and he’s wearing the “cool guy” summer uniform of 1955. His shirt is unbuttoned to the navel, his short sleeves are rolled and his collar is turned up in back. One headless mannequin behind him is wearing a red dress. The one next to it disappears in he light from the window but in another shot you see it clearly with a head and a hat.  

I studied that scene the first time because I thought I recalled from seeing the story in ’85 that the man was wearing a crucifix. I was following resurrection links and Chris links at the time. People born on or near Christmas are often named Christopher or Christine, Chris for short. I was trying to tell if the crucifix offered clues to why the name Chris was popping up so often in movies I linked to Fuhrman.   

The only dress colors I thought were important when I was writing Iago in Brentwood and realized I had only scratched the surface of movie links to Fuhrman were gold or yellow and black. I thought that the black dress had to be associated with a crucifix, candlelight, diamond earrings, romantic music, “the Brentwood hello,” violent death, a tombstone, an older woman-younger man combination or a bathtub.  

The gold dress was far more restrictive. For the gold (or yellow) dress to mean anything, I also needed something in one or two related frames directly connected to O.J., Nicole or Fuhrman. The woman had to be ringed by bright balloons or lights. There had to be something in the frame that rotated like a Ferris wheel or the cylinder of a revolver. At one point when I was following “angel” links I ran into Cheryl Ladd as Kris in an episode of Charlie’s Angels spread-eagle on a rotating disk surrounded by balloons with someone throwing knives at her.  

Tessa Richarde got me started with this. In Bronco Billy she wears a yellow and gold costume and looks at herself in a mirror ringed with lights while preparing to appear with Bronco Billy in his knife-throwing act. In the act, she is mounted to a spinning disk surrounded by balloons. I focused on her because of her role as “Billie” in Cat People and because her initials in Bronco Billy were M.F. for Mitzi Frittz. Everyone knows what O.J. Simpson’s Bronco meant to Fuhrman and every movie I saw Richarde in had something to do with Fuhrman’s account of the Bundy murders. If she meant as much to Fuhrman as I thought she did I expected to see something related to her in Murder in Greenwich.  

I had given up on finding a gold dress anywhere in Murder in Greenwich. I was looking for Christmas links when I spotted something on the desk of Police Chief Ferris that looked like a Christmas decoration. I hoped that identifying the object would tell me the season.  

I captured the clearest frame I could from the scene and blew it up until I could make only bigger blurs out of the smaller ones. In the foreground, Christopher Meloni as Fuhrman with the deputy telling him that he “won’t find any bloody glove in Greenwich” was sharp. Chief Ferris (as in Ferris Wheel) in the background was blurred. The unidentified object was still unidentifiable, but one thing was clear; it was a statuette with a ring of lights circling a gold figure. It looked like an angel. Whatever it was, it had a halo over its head and it was positioned to be seen just the way it appeared. It reminded me of the blurred photo of the knife box that Fuhrman said he found on O.J.’s bathtub.  

Now back to Helen Mirren as plain, mousy Betty and attractive, sophisticated Susan in Dead Woman’s Shoes…. 

Betty opens a cardboard bock with neatly folded clothes and a pair of elegant, black, high-heeled shoes on top. You can tell by the way she gasps and clasps her hands together that they are a rare find. She can’t resist trying them on. But as soon as she does you can tell just by the way she moves her feet that she is no longer the same woman. Moments before she had retreated from the advances of the man with the unbuttoned shirt as though he were too good for her. Now, still looking only at her shoes you can tell that it won’t happen this time. He speaks to her, she says, “Buzz off, creep,” steps over his outstretched cowboy boot and strides confidently out the door.  

She arrives at the Montgomery estate in a taxicab. She tosses the driver her purse, walks up to the door in her dead woman’s shoes and rings the bell. Theresa Saldana as Inez the maid answers. She sees a stranger, but Fritz the poodle comes to the woman and snuggles happily in her arms. Inez is taken off guard by the fact that the strange woman called her and the dog by name and walked boldly inside the house as though she lived there. She confronts the woman in Betty’s body on the staircase and is again taken aback when the woman tells her things about herself and her private life that only Susan Montgomery knew.  

Something about Theresa Saldana’s name and face told me that I should have known more about her. Somehow I thought her name was mixed up with the taxi driver and Cybill Shepherd in Moonlighting but I got nowhere with that and forgot about it until the hour I started writing this page.  A taxi driver did have a special connection to Saldana but not the driver in Dead Woman’s Shoes. It was Robert De Niro, the crazy taxicab driver in Taxi Driver. De Niro is the boxer Jake La Motta in Raging Bull (’80). Saldana had a leading role in that movie. I couldn’t place her in it because I never saw it. I did see De Niro and Shepherd in Taxi Driver and there is a Cybill Sheppard link in Moonlighting to a maid in Dead Woman’s Shoes but the maid is not Theresa Saldana.  

This business with Theresa Saldana is another example of common memory association errors and why Fuhrman couldn’t keep everything out of the Bundy murders and his movie that he got from the movies. When I checked Saldana’s bio this time, I saw something that I last read about and saw on TV in 1982 – something that helped explain the water stains on the poem photographed on the bloody Bundy murder scene.  

In 1982 an obsessed fan named Arthur Jackson stalked and stabbed Theresa Saldana repeatedly on the front lawn of her home. As she was trying to fight off her attacker, a water deliveryman named Jeff Fenn intervened and subdued the man with the knife. In the Bundy murders, the killer rewrote the script and recast the brunette female victim as a blonde and her rescuer as another victim. This time the woman and the man who came to her rescue – according to Fuhrman – died.  

Theresa Saldana appeared as herself in the 1984 TV movie about her ordeal called Victims for Victims.  

Fuhrman dropped in at the Rockingham estate in the last quarter of 1984. He initiated a meeting with screenwriter Laura Hart in January 1985. He wrote about his Rockingham visit in 1989. He was the first detective on the Bundy murder scene in 1994.  

When the first patrol officer arrived on the Bundy crime scene an hour and a half after the killings he found Nicole’s bathtub filled with water. After Fuhrman arrived and toured the bathroom, the tub was empty. Draw your own conclusions… 

Dead Woman’s Shoes lends itself to the Bundy murders in several ways. The killer wore shoes with the same tread pattern as a line of Bruno Magli shoes, the brand name of the shoes that Nicole bought for herself. In that sense, you can say that the killer wore the dead woman’s shoes. The 911 tapes played in court made it appear that Nicole was speaking from the grave and pointing an accusing finger at her killer.  

Dead Woman’s Shoes also lends itself to Murder in Greenwich with Fuhrman, the co-writer and producer figuratively putting himself in Martha Moxley’s shoes to tell his version of the story. In case you didn’t see Murder in Greenwich or you did see it and don’t recall the segment that allows me to use the literal and figurative meaning of putting himself in someone else’s shoes …  

Fade in from bonfire scene… Fuhrman grumbles about criticism he is getting in the Greenwich news media as Chief Ferris tells TV reporters that he has questions about Fuhrman’s credibility. Weeks is holding a sheet of paper next to the TV show listings in the newspaper. He says, “Cops is on.” Fuhrman grumbles, “They’re making this all about me. It’s déjà vu all over again.” Weeks says, “Put yourself in their shoes.” Fuhrman replies, “I can’t afford their shoes.”  The déjà vu all over again” line comes from New York Yankee manager Leo DeRosher. Look what else you get in this exchange: 

You get major components of the scene that starts with Weeks greeting Fuhrman at the train station and commenting on the Yankees. The scene ends with Weeks calling Fuhrman and “gumshoe” and handing him the Greenwich Bulletin, which Furman tosses in a barrel of burning leaves. A close-up of the newspaper shows a photo of O.J. trying on the bloody gloves and a photo of Fuhrman holding his hand over his mouth in the classic “tell” fashion. A tell is something people do to betray themselves. Honest people put a hand over their mouth when a lie slips out in an unconscious attempt to catch it and put it back. The headline above the photos says, “DISGRACED COP TO WRITE BOOK ON MOXLEY MURDER”. Fuhrman disgraced himself with the lie he told about the n-word. 

Between the beginning and end of that scene you have a missing murder weapon used to stab the victim in the throat and uniformed cops looking in the wrong place for clues to a killer. Fuhrman went to the “right place” in the Simpson case. He went to O.J. Simpson’s house. On the ride from the train station in Murder in Greenwich you have Fuhrman saying the police “avoid that house like it was haunted.” You see sniffing dogs, uniformed cops and people in knit caps.  

In short, you have two scenes from the same movie evoking the Bundy killings, the major evidence in the trial and the “irrelevant” lie that Fuhrman says turned the O.J. trial into the Mark Fuhrman trial. The latter scene underlines the “shoe” in gumshoe and the “tell” when Fuhrman puts his hand over his mouth after saying, “I can’t afford their shoes.” I’m guessing that Christopher Meloni did that on his own without consciously realizing why he did it. He worked with O.J. Simpson in 1^st & Ten. Working with Fuhrman in Murder in Greenwich he had to notice that he couldn’t wear O.J.’s shoes but Fuhrman could. And he had to know that Fuhrman could afford them. I don’t think he was entirely comfortable with putting himself in Fuhrman’s shoes.   

Here I should acquaint you with my 6-minute rule. It means that I divided a movie into six-minute segments beginning and ending with the last relevant word or shot in comparison to a similar segment from another movie. It will take a better mathematician than I am to figure the odds of incorporating as many compound elements into Murder in Greenwich that I do from other movies or TV shows by chance in 6 minutes or less. But with Murder in Greenwich being 88 minutes long you can see immediately that 6 minutes out of 88 allows little room for anything that didn’t come from the suspected source.  

How many movies have you seen that show a blonde female ghost, a character from OZ, delphiniums next to a mirror, a character going outside to kill somebody, a black Mercedes Benz and a convertible? Make that convertible a Mercedes Benz, toss in a rich, blonde, female murder victim kissing her killer, gunshots, a murderer who got away with it, a barking dog and a homicide detective. Then ask yourself where all of those things came from if you see them again within a span of six minutes in a movie that was produced later.  

Dead Woman’s Shoes contains all of the elements listed above. When Kyle sees Betty in Susan’s black dress curled up on the couch he asks who she is. He recognizes the shoe because he bought them for his wife. The strange woman tells him that she is “The Wicked Witch of the East” (the witch with the magic shoes) and confronts him with her murder. Kyle protests that his wife died in an accidental fall from a balcony.  

Susan Montgomery’s ghost inside of Betty’s body knows Kyle is lying. She tells him the details of how he killed her and then gives him a kiss. The kiss, like a secret handshake, tells Kyle that if she isn’t possessed by Susan’s spirit she certainly knows enough about her and him to get him busted.  He goes for his revolver he keeps in a box but Susan has beaten him to it. She whips it out, points it at him and fires. She is a lousy shot so she misses at close range and Kyle runs out of the house. She goes after him, pausing to admire herself in a wall mirror next to a vase of delphiniums.

Kyle runs away past a black Mercedes Benz. Susan runs after him but her shoes impede her so she takes them off. Her spirit leaves Betty’s body. A dog barks. Betty tosses the revolver away, puts the shoes in a trash barrel and leaves. Tyra Ferrell as a maid comes out to empty the trash. She puts on the shoes. Susan’s spirit enters her body. She picks up the revolver. She walks to the Montgomery house. You hear a shot. A voice-over wraps things up.

The gunshot in Murder in Greenwich comes from a car chase scene on TV during Fuhrman’s recreation of events leading up to Martha’s death. Furman does some of the voiceover and Martha’s ghost does some. I began that six-minute sequence with Fuhrman opening the door of a black Mercedes Benz convertible. He tells Weeks his solution to the crime. You see Martha kissing Michael. You see Michael at the Morgan house (remember Morgana Excalibur?). Michael Skakel stands seething. You see a mirror and delphiniums in the background over his left shoulder. He runs after Martha with a six-iron, kills her and runs away. A dog barks. Next scene: Former LAPD Det. Fuhrman puts flowers on Martha’s tombstone. As Steve Carroll drives away he tells Fuhrman, “You never stop being a cop.”

Contact the author: Jasper Garrison
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