Table of Contents

Chapter 17

Some things I wrote about The Dark Half in the first Smoking Gun have to be repeated here. I wrote those things early in 1999 with no interest in Mark Fuhrman’s newly published Murder in Greenwich book and obviously no knowledge of what his 2002 movie version of that book would contain.  My goal then was to show The Dark Half links to the murders in Brentwood that O.J. Simpson was put on trial for committing as well as the links to Fuhrman that made his Murder in Brentwood book possible. I wanted to show how matching patterns in the evidence, in Fuhrman’s role in the investigation, and in particular movies proved that the killer and the Murder in Brentwood author were the same man.  

The Dark Half was one of the movies Fuhrman must have seen to do the things necessary to be a best selling author when he went to Greenwich in 1997 to write his second bestseller. Jack the Ripper (’88), Ghost, Bronco Billy, Eyes of Laura Mars, The Jagged Edge, The Naked Gun series, Capricorn One, Maid to Order, Twin Peaks, Double Indemnity and In the Heat of the Night also came up big. So did The Twilight Zone and The New Twilight Zone versions of “Shadow Play” and “Dead Man’s Shoes” based on the original teleplays by Charles Beaumont. 

Many films made prior to 1994 involve multiple victims, throat slashing, massive blood loss, a bleeding killer, a killer with a Jekyll and Hyde personality and a killer who sees himself in a mirror. In some of those movies the killer leaves blood stains on the inside of his getaway vehicle, wears leather gloves, distinctive shoes and is in some way associated with the game of football. If you put all of those elements together one way you get Mark Fuhrman’s Murder in Brentwood with O.J. as the Jekyll and Hyde killer. If you put them together another way you get George Romero’s screenplay adaptation of Stephen King’s The Dark Half with Timothy Hutton as Thad Beaumont and his subconscious creation George Stark. In both cases all of the elements are present. 

Have you heard of a murder case other than in The Dark Half and Murder in Brentwood where all of those elements existed in any form? Furman moves several steps closer to The Dark Half with the specifics of his Bundy murder hypothesis. He figuratively puts himself in O.J.’s shoes as he describes O.J. committing the murders, fleeing the scene in his Bronco, dropping a leather glove and cleaning up in the maid’s bathroom sink. Where you don’t see something specific from The Dark Half in that sequence you get it in other movie or TV show like Charles’ Beaumont’s “Dead Man’s Shoes.” The Dark Half requires little help as you see with George Stark slashing a man’s throat with a straight razor held in leather gloves and Thad Beaumont taking the blame. 

It’s more than okay to vary the source programs a bit here and there. That’s what Fuhrman had to do to make his explanations for the evidence he “found” fit conditions that he had no control over and to hide the source of his inspiration. Without a little variation you can’t have a disguised copy of anything. It would be like the Devil introducing himself to Harry Angel as Lucifer instead of Louis Cyphre. But like Harry Angel you have to be in heavy denial not to make the connection. 

Denial is one key to Fuhrman’s success as a killer and a writer. Most people don’t believe in legal “technicalities” that make police work difficult. They believe that good cops sometimes have to bend the law to put criminals behind bars or on death row where they belong. They believe in super detectives who see important evidence ordinary detectives miss. They don’t believe that cops murder people. They don’t believe in intricate murder/frame/up plots. They believe that suspects confronted with overwhelming evidence of their guilt who claim they were framed are lying. They believe that wealthy suspects have more resources to subvert the law than the State has to enforce it. None of these things are true but the truth counts only when it conforms to what people believe before they see the evidence or hear the testimony.   

You have to believe in the Biblical God to believe in Lucifer – God’s Fallen Angel. Angel Heart’s Harry Angel is an Atheist with amnesia. Therefore no amount of evidence or even the strong suggestion implicit in his own last name can persuade him that the Devil might have a hand in his assignment. He doesn’t know what the inverted pentagram on Cyphre’s ring, Toots Sweet’s gold tooth or Margaret Krusemark’s pendent means. He doesn’t know what the inverted cross stands for or how the Devil is depicted when he opens the doors to a shrine in the room where Winesap introduced him to Cyphre. It doesn’t occur to him that he could be doing the Devil’s work.

You have seen this variety of self-denial in more movies than you can count. Usually the menace to a family, a community or the world is a monster from outer space or some other creature that everybody knows does not exist. The people who know the truth and try to tell what they know are automatically dismissed as liars, lunatics, opportunists, gullible twits or victims of their overactive imaginations.  

You see this identical pattern in dramas, murder mysteries and suspense yarns where clever villains, government agents or renegade cops frame people. The difference is that in these movies the “logical story,” the one that matches popular preconceptions of the truth, would work in real life. Nobody would believe the frame-up victim’s shaky alibi and he would never get away from the authorities as he does in the movies long enough to prove his innocence. The people who believe in his innocence would be no help if the killer also planted attractive evidence for them leading nowhere. As a character in an Agatha Christie screenplay Murder is Easy says, “Murder is easy if no one suspects you.” 

No one who mattered suspected Fuhrman of murdering Ron Goldman and Nicole Simpson and framing O.J. for his crime. They didn’t believe it because he was such an obvious fictional murder mystery suspect. In a fiction murder mystery the most obvious suspect is never guilty. Moreover, this was a real crime, not a screenplay, so if you see evidence of a frame-up imbedded in clear evidence of a suspect’s guilt you must be seeing a frame-up that exists only in your mind. That automatic response to clear evidence of guilt is consistent and therefore predictable. If you want to frame somebody for murder you can’t do better than to get your ideas from the movies. Even the people who saw the movies will immediately conclude that things like that don’t happen in reality…. 

In The Dark Half, Michael Rooker as Sheriff Alan Pangborn is at a loss to explain the evidence of murder against Thad Beaumont. A photographer named Homer was beaten to death with his own prosthetic leg a short distance from a mock burial sight for Beaumont’s creation George Stark. Beaumont used George Stark as a pseudonym for the author of his popular murder and mayhem books. Pangborn is at the Main cemetery where the mock burial took place when he receives the call that homer was killed. He is there to investigate what he believes to be a case of vandalism. The call about Homer’s homicide doesn’t change anything by itself. 

Royal Dano is Digger Holt the gravedigger who called Sheriff Pangborn to the cemetery when he discovered a hole in the ground where Thad Beaumont and his wife Elizabeth posed for Homer’s pictures. Stark’s tombstone was fake and the shot was taken on a plot of ground owned by the Beaumont family with nothing buried there that Homer, Digger, Thad or Elizabeth knew about. Digger often saw ghosts so Pangborn doesn’t see what Digger sees. Digger sees evidence that someone buried in the ground dug himself up and pulled himself out. Pangborn just sees a hole and evidence that a vandal dug the hole and pulled himself out of it when he finished digging. Homer sees a link to the mock burial ceremony of George Stark. Pangborn sees a coincidence.  

When Pangborn gets the call about Homer’s death he still doesn’t make the connection between Thad Beaumont and the “funeral” of George Stark. It takes a call from the Connecticut State Police and Thad’s fingerprint stamped in blood inside of Homer’s pickup truck to do that. 

Homer’s killer stole his pickup truck and took it across the Main border into Connecticut. A Connecticut State Police trooper found it in a used car lot with the interiors splattered in blood. Pangborn can’t believe that Thad Beaumont would have done such a thing but the bloody fingerprint is evidence he can’t ignore. His working theory is that somebody is going though a lot of trouble to make Thad look guilty. Thad and Elizabeth are sure that they know who it is.  

Before we go further with The Dark Half lets look at some items I wrote about in the first Smoking Gun because of their links to 875 S. Bundy and those I couldn’t write about because they didn’t have Bundy links. 

I had dozens of links to tombstones, simulated tombstones, symbolic tombstones and the names Beaumont, Elizabeth, George and Michael. I had identified the recurrent Jekyll and Hyde theme, ghost theme and resurrection theme. I had bird links and bear links. I knew that “Dead Man’s Shoes” and “Dead Woman’s Shoes” had a special significance to Fuhrman. I knew that his old pickup truck had something to do with his description of O.J.’s Bronco and his story of O.J. seeing himself in a mirror as a murderer. All of these items had multiple movie links between Fuhrman’s role in the arrest and prosecution of O.J. Simpson. All of them appeared in The Dark Half.  

Fuhrman’s role in his TV movie production of Murder in Greenwich has just as many Dark Half links. Most of these Dark Half links overlap Fuhrman’s involvement in the Bundy murders. Some of them are either specific to Murder in Greenwich or they emphasis points in Murder in Greenwich that were weren’t emphasized in Murder in Brentwood. 

You see several shots of teenagers swinging baseball bats and smashing pumpkins in Murder in Greenwich, mostly as symbolic representations of Michael swinging a golf club and smashing Martha’s skull. Homer’s prosthetic leg has a foot attached, which gives us the rough shape of a golf club. His stolen truck gives us a Connecticut link.  

The name “Homer” and the way he was killed also give us a baseball link. Hank Aaron, the most prolific home run hitter in Major League baseball history was known as “Hammerin’ Hank.” Hank Aaron and Mark Fuhrman share the same birthday. The Michael connection to The Dark Half is when Homer greets a man from New York who is going to write the text for Homer’s photos of Thad and Elizabeth with George Stark’s tombstone. The writer’s name is Mike. He wears a cowboy hat. He rode to the cemetery with Thad and Elizabeth.  

Only on the tombstone that appears in Fuhrman’s Murder in Greenwich book and movie will you see the name “Elizabeth.” Also keep in mind that President Theodore Roosevelt was from New York. He was a bear hunter and the Teddy Bear was named after him. 

Homer took pictures of Teddy Bears in coffins. When reporters tried to contact Fuhrman before his perjury conviction, they got his voice in a recorded message saying that he was going bear hunting. 

Bears, bear claws and bear traps are common themes in the movies I linked to Fuhrman in The Smoking Gun. In Murder in Greenwich you see Maggie Grace as Martha on her bed with several dolls including a Teddy Bear. In Fuhrman’s theory of where she was when the Greenwich police thought she was dead, you see her in a room of the Skakel house on a bed with a Teddy Bear pillow.   

White hair is another common theme and another Murder in Greenwich link to George Stark’s tombstone. At Martha’s funeral you see a mourner with white hair sitting on the bench behind Constance Forster and in front of Rushton and Julie Skakel. Behind them you see Michael and Tommy. Fuhrman said in O.J.’s murder trial that his top three athletes of all time were boxer George Foreman (bloody leather gloves) and basketball greats Michael Jordan and Larry Bird, in that order. George Foreman always struck me as an odd choice given Fuhrman’s claim that basketball was his favorite sport.  

The George Forman top pick got stranger when I read Murder in Brentwood where he repeated his George Forman, Michael Jordan, Larry Bird athlete favorites but favored baseball metaphors in his descriptions. In addition, one of his chilling uses of the n-word on a Laura Hart McKinny tape involved taking a black suspect to “the baseball diamond” to beat him up. This reference reinforced what he told his LAPD shrinks about loving to beat up “niggers” and practicing his kicks on the way to work. On the tape you hear him say, “Ever try to find a bruise on a nigger?” Recorded statements like that led to his perjury conviction.  

All things considered, it struck me that Fuhrman named George Forman because he was a remarkable black athlete everyone knew and his last name was close to Fuhrman. It also struck me that his real top pick was a peerless white baseball player with “George” in his name, a name that Fuhrman couldn’t mention because of the violence and racism associated with it. One baseball player stands alone in these respects. He called black people “niggers.” He was noted for hitting the ball as no one has ever done with his bat and hitting players with his fists and spikes. He sent 12 opposing ball players to the hospital in one season.

That distinction goes to Tyrus Raymond Cobb of the Detroit Tigers. His nickname was The Georgia Peach. In Cobb (’94) Tommy Lee Jones as the old Ty Cob has brown hair in back but on top and on the front sides it’s white.  The screenplay’s writer Ron Shelton also wrote White Men Can’t Jump with Wesley Snipes, Woody Harrelson and Tyra Ferrell. In Major League, Snipes, like Cobb for the Detroit Tigers is a prolific base stealer for the Cleveland Indians. Like Foreman, he wears leather gloves. He pins one to a wall every time he steals a base. 

Another George link to Murder in Greenwich associated with the unidentified white-haired man at Martha Moxley’s funeral is George “Sparky” Anderson. He managed the World Series Champion Cincinnati Reds and Detroit Tigers, which might remind you of Stephen Weeks comment to Fuhrman, “My Yankee’s are two games up; I’m happy.” The difference, of course, is Weeks’ Yankees were winners and the Yankees that Anderson faced lost. George “Sparky” Anderson’s 1984 Tigers beat the Padres in five games. His 1976 Reds with Pete Rose, Johnny Bench, Tony Perez, Ken Griffey, Joe Morgan and George Foster swept the Yankees in four.

In Iago in Brentwood, I speculated that Fuhrman witnessed O.J.’s baseball bat assault on his car around the 1985 anniversary of the Tigers’ ’84 World Series win over the San Diego Padres. Later I discovered that the incident occurred in 1984. I found enough information to suggest that one reason Fuhrman named Foreman, Jordan and Bird as his top athletes was because he bet on them and a lot of money. I also found enough to suggest that he lost a lot of money in ’84 by betting against white-haired George Lee Anderson’s Tigers    

As you see Dorothy Moxley turning the pages of her photo album in Murder in Greenwich you have to freeze the frame to see clearly that Maggie Grace as Martha is holding a cat. It doesn’t matter whether the cat in the photo is supposed to be Junior or Tiger. It's a cat. A tiger is a cat and Martha named one of her cats Tiger. The more I looked in movies for cat links to Martha and Nicole the more I saw witches, pizzas, golf clubs, ghosts, birds, Satan worshipers and actors with white hair.

I wasn’t looking for a cat link when I stumbled across it and the white-haired men that it led to. I was looking for leopards. I was surprised to learn that all cats are technically panthers (a Bengal tiger is panthera tigris tigris). Pizza links led me to tombstones. Fuhrman’s time altering tricks led me to trains. Bird led me to baseball, stars, hearts, false whiskers and red hair converging on Mark Fuhrman’s birthday. I went from a cat hair on the black dress that Nicole Simpson was killed in to a man with white hair the same way. All but a handful of the hundreds of movie and TV links I followed to write The Smoking Gun and The Smoking Gun 2 eventually led to the same movie, Murder in Greenwich. 

A man’s white hair in Murder in Greenwich also links to the popular TV series Matlock and the Murder, She Wrote episode “Murder, According to Maggie.” In “Murder, According to Maggie,” Margaret Elizabeth McCauley is a television producer who also writes the scripts for her show called Beat Cop, with Tim Thomerson as her white-haired star.  

The Dark Half’s Digger Holt and Homer had white hair. So did Hank Aaron in the ’90s when Fuhrman was the star witness in the O.J. murder trial and when he went to Greenwich to write his second best seller. Aaron played most of his baseball career with the Atlanta Braves. He ended it in Milwaukee with the Brewers. The Milwaukee club was named after the producers of Milwaukee’s best-known product, beer. 

In the TV series Matlock, Andy Griffith as Ben Matlock is a lawyer in Atlanta Georgia. He is a baseball fan and he has white hair. Andrew Mitchell is the baseball fan Stephen Weeks in Murder in Greenwich.  

Michael Skakel’s alibi for the time of Martha’s murder was that he was watching TV at his cousin’s house with his brothers John and Rushton Jr. The Murder in Greenwich movie calls it the “Morgan” house. In the book, Fuhrman uses the real names and a litany of horrors associated with them. Michel’s cousin was Jim Terrien. Jim’s father was George and his mother was Georgeann. Throughout the movie you see Michael, Martha, Fuhrman and other characters drinking beer. At the “Morgan” house, you see Michel sitting on a couch with his brothers and his Cousin “Larry Morgan” brooding over seeing Tommy with Martha. Empty beer bottles crowd the table in front of them.

When Michael gets home he sees Tommy and Martha kissing in the doorway. While Martha’s voiceover ghost explains that nothing serious happened, Michael imagines her and Tommy locked in a sexual embrace. Marta leaves and Michael attacks Tommy. Tommy slams his brother’s head into a wall, taunts him and goes upstairs to his room laughing. Michael feels that Martha has abandoned him. He imagines her laughing at him. The killer inside of him comes to life. He bangs his own head against the wall. He hears bird sounds. He grabs a nearby golf club, runs after Martha and bashes her in the head repeatedly. He drags her under an elm tree, beats her some more, stabs her in the throat, “pulls down her panties to humiliate her” and hides her under a pine tree.  

In the USA TV trailer for the movie you see the killer plunging his bloody hands in a water-filled sink and presumably seeing his reflection in the mirror above the sink. It’s all right to use your imagination here. Fuhrman did. He made up the entire episode. Well, maybe no the entire episode. He got some of it from The Dark Half.  

George Stark began as a microscopic twin that didn’t get fully absorbed into the stronger twin’s fetus as weaker microscopic twins usually do. It found its way into Thad’s brain and began growing around the time Thad reached adolescence and started writing. Thad has pencil to paper working on a story and searching his mind for a name to call one of his characters. He sees a sparrow on his windowsill and calls his character Miss. Bird. Then he hears the sound of many birds he can’t see, chirping and fluttering their wings. An incapacitating pain in his head seizes him. His mother takes him to a doctor who can find nothing wrong but expresses mild concern about the bird sounds that Thad mentioned.  

Thad seems to recover. He finishes a line he was typing as his school bus arrives and rushes out of the house to catch it. Before he can make it, the pain in his head incapacitates him. He goes down. He gets to a Catholic hospital in Castle Rock Main in time for the doctors to open his skull and discover a “rare kind of tumor,” a twin that didn’t get absorbed and suddenly began to grow on Thad’s brain. The thing attached to Thad’s brain has one eye, part of a nostril and a tooth with a cavity. It is so freaky-looking that a nurse runs out of the operating room in horror.  

The other doctors and nurses behave professionally. But after the operation they, too, are freaked by the sudden appearance of thousands of sparrows descending on the town like something out of Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds.  

The Birds connection to The Dark Half wasn’t lost on the producer of Murder in Greenwich. You see some of both in repeated scenes with additional footage and dialog and a little help from O.J.’s capture scene in Capricorn One where his character mistakes helicopters for birds.  

Most of The Birds takes place in a costal village called Bodega Bay. The start of a massive, bloody bird attack begins in a restaurant. In Murder in Greenwich a scene linking all of the many bird sounds in the movie begins in an outdoor restaurant called Cove Café. Cove is another name for bay. In this scene Dr. Michel Baden, who helped with O.J.’s defines, gives Fuhrman and Weeks his interpretation of the crime scene and Martha’s autopsy photos. Nicole Simpson had a terrible fear of scissors. I looked for scissors in every Fuhrman-related movie. I found them in this Murder in Greenwich scene.

If you read the book you know something is drastically wrong with that scene when you see that the photo Baden hands Fuhrman is in color. In Fuhrman’s book he complains about the difficulty of getting useful information from the Greenwich authorities citing the black and white autopsy photos, the only photos Baden could get, as a prime example.  

The fundamental contradictions in Fuhrman’s case against “the Kennedys” don’t stop there. He came out of the blocks “knowing” that Martha knew her killer. He zeroed in on the golf club as a key part of his reasoning. He said that Martha didn’t put up a defense because she was used to seeing the killer with a golf club and she was walking with him when he suddenly turned on her in a fit of rage. Never mind that this is a slightly edited version of his story about O.J. attacking Nicole. We’re looking at contradictions here. …Fuhrman proceeded to tell a story he heard about the Skakel and Terrien men being well known in Belle Haven for carrying golf clubs at night as walking sticks. In the movie, he tells a completely different story.

When Baden shows Fuhrman the color autopsy photo he says that “there were four wounds consistent with the head of a golf club,” Fuhrman comments, “First blow; he incapacitates her. She goes down.” Weeks says, “She never knew what hit her.” Fuhrman adds, “Or who.” The incapacitating first blow is certainly what happed to Nicole Simpson and there was one wound on the back of her head to tell the story. So far Baden hasn’t said anything to indicate how many times she was truck before she died. Yet, Fuhrman “knows” that the first blow incapacitated her – sort of like Thad Beaumont’s headache.  

Baden describes indications that Martha was dragged face down across her driveway to an elm tree where she was hit in the head three more times. He describes a pool of blood so long and wide that Martha must have bled for at least thirty minutes. Fuhrman deduces that the killer left the scene, came back and saw that Martha was still alive and stabbed her in the throat with the broken shaft of the golf club. He fills in the rest of the story leaving only the killer’s identity blank. As Baden is about to board the train out of Greenwich Fuhrman asks his opinion of time of death. Based on Martha’s stomach contents, Baden puts the time of death late enough to destroy Tommy and Michael’s alibi.  

During the Cove Café exchange between Baden, Fuhrman and Weeks, you see flashbacks to previous scenes and previews of coming attractions. One flashback shows the feet of Steve Carroll and another detective on the edge of the large pool of blood. When you saw the whole scene the first time you heard a helicopter flying overhead – one of O.J.’s “birds.” The next fifteen seconds of that flashback gives you a preview of coming attractions with Alex Grafton telling Fuhrman about Julie keeping an eye on Michael and Constance Foster coming over “to help out.” That segment begins with the cry of a crow or raven.     

Another preview is Fuhrman’s general reconstruction of the crime. When the man from Maryland gives him the final clue he fills the blanks with Michal as the killer and rejection as his motive – just like O.J. He neever explains when, why or how Michal hit Marta in s jealous rage then came back a half our later and stabbed her in the throat. Maybe he just ran out of time the way I have run out of space. “Space” is a hint. It has to do with the actress who plays Cathy in The Birds.

Contact the author: Jasper Garrison
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