Table of Contents

Chapter 29

When I was compiling my list of recurring names, props and themes I linked to Fuhrman in the movies I hit a snag. There were so many of them one could argue that there were bound to be illusory connections between some of them and Fuhrman purely by chance. I understood the argument because that was my first impression. In the novel I wrote two years before the murders, I used some of the names, objects and themes you see in Fuhrman’s account of his O.J. Simpson murder investigation. I even have a Jimmy and a Cain in the same character.   

My novel had nothing to do with the murders in Brentwood. It stood to reason that the similarities I noticed between the movies and the murders had nothing to do with each other – except for three things: 

1.        I had no ambition to write a screenplay.

2.        I did not contribute to the evidence against O.J. Simpson.

3.        I was not obsessed with the movies or the Simpsons. 

Prior to June 13, 1994 O.J. Simpson was to me a living football legend, a football color commentator and a celebrity who did commercials for Hertz Rent-a-Car. He was an actor who wasn’t much of an actor except for one serious role in Roots and his hilarious role as Nordberg in The Naked Gun series, a role that no man who took himself seriously could play. O.J. was a constant TV presence. I saw him on Dragnet, on a Lucile Ball show and the television move Detour to Terror. O.J. was a household name. White women openly lusted for him and white men genuinely liked him. Everyone placed him above race. That was my picture of O.J. Simpson.  

I was almost finished with my second book in The Random Factor trilogy and getting The Invisible Warriors ready for the printer when I heard the news about the murders in Brentwood on my car radio. I heard that someone had repeatedly slashed and stabbed O.J.’s wife and a younger, unidentified white man with a knife.    

The story included reminders that O.J. had a record of wife beating, that his wife was 12 years younger than he was and she was white. The gratuitous racial references were enough to make it clear that O.J. was no longer above race. All of the elements were present from the start to draw only one reasonable conclusion: The black 46-year-old celebrity obviously killed his white 35-year-old wife and a white 25-year-old man in a jealous rage. The similarities between that story and a shallow reading of Shakespeare’s Othello had to be coincidental. It was the same story, minus Iago, with a few things moved around a bit. Everybody understands coincidence – about as well as they understand Shakespeare. 

As more news about the murders in Brentwood came in I learned that the first report was a tad off. The murdered woman was O.J.’s ex-wife, not his wife. According to these reports he took an unscheduled flight to Chicago on the night of the murders but and alibi was questionable. “Los Angeles police” found a bloody glove on the murder scene and a matching glove on his Rockingham estate. “They” found a blood trial leading from O.J.’s car into his driveway and a bloody ski mask in his bedroom closet. The murder weapon wasn’t a knife, as first believed. It was a military entrenching tool, a compact digging instrument with a folding spade like James Woods uses in Best Seller with Brian Dennehy to dig up a murder weapon. Chicago police found one covered with blood in a dumpster near O.J.’s hotel. 

How could any reasonable person not presume that O.J. was guilty?  

I would have had no doubt of O.J.’s guilt if he had confessed, if the only story about his cut finger from witnesses on his plane didn’t back up his story and if the news stories about other evidence didn’t keep changing. The murder weapon was a knife after all, not an entrenching tool. O.J.’s flight to Chicago was scheduled weeks in advance. Reporters were either doing a sloppy job of gathering information or somebody with inside knowledge was deliberately feeding them false reports.  

First reports in big, ongoing news stories are notoriously inaccurate. Ordinarily you can rely on them only as rough sketches. They are usually followed by error corrections and more details in subsequent reports to give you a more accurate picture. The difference here was that the errors kept piling up. Every day that the media corrected one error they added one or two new errors. When they had to choose between getting the new story out right and getting it out right away they invariably chose to get it out right away. Soon, they stopped correcting “small” errors altogether and relied more and more on confidential sources close to the accused, the female victim or the investigation. Those errors persist.  

In the first six months after the murders it became difficult to tell the mainstream media and the tabloid media apart. They all reported anything that painted O.J. a darker shade of guilt and a darker shade of Negro. Time magazine went so far as to feature a mug shot of O.J. on its cover altered to make his skin color darker than it was. 

And what was the deal with the cop who found the bloody glove on Rockingham? Who was calling him a racist? Where was the evidence that he was? Assuming he was a racist and racism motivated him to plant the Rockingham glove, where did he get it? What about all of the other evidence that other police officers found, like the blood smeared all over his Bronco door handle and the blood trail from Bundy going into O.J.’s Rockingham gate? What about the stories of other spouse-abuse incidents we hadn’t heard before; Nicole’s desperate call to 911 and this thing about O.J. threatening Nicole with a baseball bat?  

Surely one man couldn’t be at the bottom of all those things. Besides, every alternative to O.J.’s guilt looked too much like what Iago did to bring down the title character in Shakespeare’s Othello and the bad guys in my first novel did to one of my characters to be real. They looked too much like frame-ups in Dick Tracy, Strangers on a Train, The Dark Corner, To Protect and Serve, Ricochet, Physical Evidence, Mr. Destiny, The Last Innocent Man, China Moon, and The Naked Gun.

They looked too much like popular fiction. 

The bad guys I invented for The Random Factor would have known whether O.J. was guilty or innocence because they possesses a technology that allows them to see and record past events. I was already running into problems with my vision of 21^st century inventions that were coming into common use thirty years earlier than I anticipated. Writers take that risk whenever they use advanced technology of their day and project what it will become in the near future. The murders that O.J. Simpson appeared to be guilty of committing presented the same problem and required the same method of solving it.  

I had to go back to my novel and modify it to take into account every “new” development that would be old news at some unspecified point between 2130 and 2150. I couldn’t tell when a new development in the O.J. Simpson case would give a definitive answer to whether or not O.J. did it. That’s how I came to learn that he didn’t – and Mark Fuhrman did. 

WARNING: The following paragraphs are rated R for adult language and unmistakable symbolism for a specific sexual act....  

Creating a world is hard. The laws of physics, probability and human nature don’t change but everything and everybody in the world you create affect everything and everybody around them. If you don’t work within those limitations it shows. And it sucks. When you hear Rebecca Carlson in Body of Evidence say, “Have you ever seen animals making love?” you’ll get the point. Really now, has anyone ever seen animals “making love.” More importantly, she says this to William DeFoe as her married lawyer Frank Dulaney in an R-rated movie as he is driving her home in the rain. Would Madonna’s character use that language in that situation? No fucking way.  

Why would a sexually adventurous adult who flaunts her sexuality in public talk that way to another adult in private? Perhaps the writers did what I did in The Random Factor, using her language is a clue to some hidden component of her personality, her innocence, her guilt, her motives or her MO that accounts for this inconsistency? They didn’t. They simply failed to match the language to the character.  

The Body of Evidence producers unabashedly patterned Madonna’s Rebecca after Sharon Stone’s Catherine in Basic Instinct. The sexual shocker there was in the interrogation room where you can see Stone’s pubic hair when she crosses her legs. Her character then takes a polygraph test, passes it and boasts to the detective driving her home in the rain that she could have beaten the test if she were guilty. In Body of Evidence the sexual shocker is supposed to be Madonna putting her middle finger in her panties and simulating masturbation. The real shocker is what she does with that finger before then. She buries it past the second knuckle in her mouth.  

In a restaurant scene she puts a strawberry in her mouth to convey the same message. In Madonna’s Truth or Dare documentary, a friend asks her to demonstrate with a longneck bottle how she gives head. She does – like someone who has had a lot of practice – like Faye Resnick’s portrait of Nicole Simpson. She even swallows the water in the bottle. 

Madonna’s Body of Evidence use of her finger and the strawberry are French connections to the character and to the actress, a combination of fiction and fact. It’s also a French connection to Witness for the Procution (the murder victim’s name), to Murder in Greenwich (the movie that Banks uses as an alibi) and the McKinny tapes. Fuhrman uses the word “cocksucker” at the start of the first tape in a way that implies he had been using it regularly before she started recording. The character he says he was “play acting” on the tapes sounded so much like The French Connection’s Popeye Doyle that I was sure he mentioned him and the movie by name in Murder in Brentwood. He didn’t. 

I didn’t know there was a French connection in Murder in Greenwich when I wrote about it in The Smoking Gun and I didn’t pick it up it by way of chance or psychic intuition. I got it from the arrangement of little things Furman says in Murder in Brentwood before and after he describes his “Dirty Harry meets Attila the Hun” character. Once he got started down a certain track he couldn’t switch over to another one.  

This is what novelists mean when they say characters begin to talk to them. Fictional characters in some situations have a wide range of options. In other situations they are locked into the demands of their personalities, their roles, their habits, their desires, their fears and their surroundings. They say what they say and they do what they do because they have no choice. I incorporated this revelation into my Random Factor plot because once I discovered it I had no choice. If I tried to force something into the situation that didn’t belong, it showed.

That’s one of many reasons that movies like Body of Evidence hit so many false notes and no amount of gratuitous sex or nudity can save them. That’s also why gratuitous sex, nudity, violence and foul language don’t work. The principle is the same. Either they fit or they don’t.  

Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn doesn’t work without the n-word. No other word will do. When you see Frederic Forrest in The Conversation with Gene Hackman and Cindy Williams remember that Forrest is Pap in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (’85). Mark Twain’s Pap uses the n-word because his character wouldn’t know what other word to use. Rap star Ice-T who appears with Christopher Meloni in Law and Order: Special Victims Unit uses the word repeatedly in his Ricochet rap. Denzel Washington’s character Nick uses the word only when talking to Ice-T as Odessa because he is speaking Odessa’s language.   

Erotic thrillers like Fatal Attraction, Body Heat and Basic Instinct require the same level of consistency. Can you imagine Catherine Tramell saying, “I liked making love with him,” as opposed to using the f-word or Alex Forrest calling Dan Gallagher a “dirty rat” as opposed to a “cocksucker”? There, I said it again. I used the cs-word. Nobody would have known what I was talking about or why it mattered if I hadn’t.  

It matters because Fuhrman used that word on the McKinny tapes. It matters because of O.J.’s angry words to Nicole on the October 1993 911 tape about seeing her through a window with restaurant manager Keith Zlomsowitch. It matters because that tape was released by the city attorney’s office where Fuhrman had a friend in a position to release it. It matters because that tape sets the stage for Fuhrman’s attribution of O.J.’s motive for murder and because Fuhrman boasted of having sex with Nicole before she made the call, her only confirmed 911 call. It matters because of Fuhrman’s role in Bill Clinton’s impeachment. 

When Fuhrman uses “nigger” and “cocksucker” on the McKinny tapes they flow naturally from his lips. Whether he is talking about something that happened or something he made up, his “character” and the characters he talks about are consistent. They say and do things that people with the qualities he attributes to them have to say and do to stay in character. His “character” can’t tell Laura Hart that Judge Ito’s wife Peggy York used sex to advance her LAPD carrier. He has to say she “fucked and sucked her way to the top.” That’s how this “character” on the McKinny tapes thinks. His language is what shapes his character and opens the door to his mind. 

When Fuhrman describes wallowing in the blood of people he says he assaulted and enjoying the smell of “niggers” who were killed in a building about to be razed his voice drips with pleasure. He sounds like a combat soldier soaking up the unique sensory conformation of his superiority in a firefight. You can’t get that feeling from standing around bloody crime scenes. You can’t get it from drinking buddies or the movies because the immediacy of mortal danger, the feeling of power and the sense of smell are so much a part of it. You can’t know how good it feels to kill an enemy soldier in combat unless you do it. I ran into many combat veterans who felt the same way and all of us were reluctant to delve into it the way Fuhrman does.  

Here’s the rub: Mark Fuhrman was never in combat.  

The issue here is consistency of character. Fuhrman’s abrasive, arrogant, racist, profane, violent character on the McKinny tapes is consistent with the man he presented himself to be to at least eight people. These people were spread out over several years and miles of geography and they didn’t know each other. Yet, they describe the same character. 

Fuhrman’s stories have a consistent flow when he inserts this character. When he doesn’t, they sound like composites of scenes from various movies made for commercial TV. He does the later in Murder in Greenwich. You see it best when his character goes to Steve Carroll’s house to seek his help in getting Martha’s killer and humbles himself in the process. The camera sweeps past a Jack O’ Lantern on the porch.  Fuhrman knocks on the door. He is wearing his brown leather jacket. A dog barks. Carroll comes to the door in a sweater and the two men talk about Martha Moxley through the screen. He promises to catch Martha’s killer. He is no longer a homicide detective officially but he’s still a cop in his heart.

This sequence comes straight out of Murderous Vision where Bruce Boxleitner as Det. Robeshaw knocks on a door wearing a brown sports jacket. A dog barks. Martha’s father comes to the door in a sweater-vest. The men speak to each other through the screen. Robeshaw humbles himself. He is no longer a homicide detective but he is still a cop. He promises to do everything he can to catch Martha’s killer. In a psychic vision, Murderous Vision’s Elizabeth wouldn’t be able to tell the Fuhrman/Carroll screen door scene and the Robeshaw/father screen door scene apart. They look like pieces of the same dream. 

In Pieces of Dreams with Lauren Hutton (Jessica in Fear) Robert Forster is a Catholic priest – a father. He appears as Jake in American Perfekt with Fairuza Balk as Alice. Boxleitner is a CIA agent codenamed “Scarecrow” in The Scarecrow and Mrs. King.  Fairuza Balk as Dorothy returns to the Land of Oz on Halloween. With the help of Jack, a new friend with a Jack O’ Lantern head, she frees her old friend the Scarecrow held prisoner by the Gnome King. Christopher Meloni is Fuhrman in Murder in Greenwich. He is a prisoner in Oz.  

When Fuhrman wrote his letter to the city attorney in 1989 he hadn’t yet gotten the hang of how to write dialogue and actions for real people. In his letter, he has one of the most recognized people on the planet telling him his name (“I’m O.J. Simpson!”). The name with the exclamation point is supposed to signify a man so arrogant that he expects the mention of it to open doors of privilege reserved for a Medieval prince.  However a man that arrogant and that well known would assume that everybody knew who he was. His would expect his physical presence to tell all who gaze upon him his name. Fuhrman could have had a supremely arrogant O.J. referring to himself in the third person but even then he would not call himself O.J. Simpson. He would call himself O.J.  

Fuhrman’s account of what he witnessed O.J. saying and doing can’t be true. He has O.J. in an agitated but controlled state while everything he says ends with an exclamation point. He has O.J. saying things that only a pimp would say about his whore. He has Nicole doing something that nobody could do. But you get the full story only when Fuhrman explains why he couldn’t identify her body on the murder scene. In his letter he says that she was sobbing. Explaining why he couldn’t identify her body he says that when he saw her with O.J. she was crying with her face in her hands. Even when she is talking to him and pointing in fear at O.J.?   

You might put something like this in a first draft of a fiction story and winch in embarrassment when you go back to it a few days later. Fuhrman never looked back at the logic of his characters’ words and actions in the letter or the logical consequences of his revision. He didn’t have to. Everyone he required to buy it bought it. None of them knew he was working on a screenplay and that he aspired to become a celebrity author like Joseph Wambaugh. None of them knew how the O.J. character he created in his letter would evolve into the real O.J. Simpson on trial for killing Nicole Simpson and Ron Goldman in a jealous rage. 

Are we looking at a psychic who saw the future? No. We are looking at a sociopath who created the future with proven formulas for success. We are looking at values of x in a double homicide and the murder trial of O.J. Simpson. Values of x in this formula are in the movies. They come from Fuhrman’s reliance on them to achieve his ambitions by murdering two people, framing O.J., starting rumors, telling lies, getting other people to lie for him, and writing a formula bestseller.  

The value of x in any move linked to Fuhrman is the persona, setting, props or theme that surrounds it. In any movie with Denzel Washington, for example, the value of x is implicit because of his portrayal of the title character in Spike Lee’s Malcolm X. The value of x in Swamp Thing (’81) is the notebook of formulas missing from Alec Holland’s experiments. This notebook holds the last secret of “grafting” animal DNA onto plant DNA to create a super plant. Alice Cable hides it under her body when Alec, gets set on fire in his lab, a lab with a greenhouse. You will recall Fuhrman standing over a charcoal grill saying, “That one is burning,” just before he learns that Alex Grafton has the value of x in the blanked out Moxley files, then visiting Grafton in his greenhouse.  

Fuhrman chose the name Alex Grafton for his movie. The first time you see him he is burning leaves. Before you see him again you hear a bird call. When you see him later you see fire, milk and flowers.

These are key ingredients in Swamp Thing with Ray Wise as Alec Holland, Adrian Barbeau as Alice Cable and Louis Jourdan as Arcane. Arcane is a mad scientist who wears for a disguise a blonde wig attached to the rubber mask of a dead man. I looked for links to Fuhrman in Swamp Thing before I heard of Murder in Greenwich mostly because Louis Jourdan is a French actor and Adrian Barbeau is a French name. I was looking for anything French. I was also looking for purple flowers or flowers with the same colors as the larkspur in the “Mothers” poem photo and the real larkspur on the ground in front of it. A rain forest seemed like a good place to poke around. I found them all. 

Ray Wise is Leland Palmer in Twin Peaks and Fire Walk With Me. He is a killer cop in an episode of Moonlighting and a soap opera star in Cat People. He is Leon Nash in Robocop, one of the Old Detroit gang members that Robocop sees in his flashback of being shot to death when he was Alex Murphy. Alex Murphy sees all of the gang members who “fired him up” when he runs a list of Emil’s known associates on the police station computer. Detroit is a French name and a blanked out French connection to the Greenwich police in Murder in Greenwich.  

Fuhrman and Weeks arrive at the Greenwich police station in a Pontiac sedan. Madonna grew up in Pontiac Michigan, often called a suburb of Detroit, probably because the Detroit Lions once played football there. Windsor Ontario is closer to Detroit than Pontiac or Auburn Hills where the Detroit Piston’s play basketball. In Madonna’s 1991 Truth or Dare documentary of her “Blonde Ambition” tour she refers to her Palace of Auburn Hills concert as a trip “home” to Detroit. Mimicking Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz she says, “There’s no place like home. There’s no place like home.” Alec Kesheshian is her director. Berry Alexander Brown is her Editor. Jim Clawson and Jay Rowe are listed as producers. 

Remember Elvira’s references to her “head,” The Haunted Palace and Elvis? Elvira is “Elvis” with the “s” deleted and “ra” in its place. Madonna’s birthday is the anniversary of Elvis Presley’s death. The movie scene where Fuhrman tells Weeks about the value of x is where he makes his Elvis joke in the book. Madonna has a brother named Christopher and a daughter named Leon. In 2000 she won a lawsuit against a company using her name to promote an X-rated website. When her Truth or Dare director tells her how he wants to see her “perform” with the bottle she calls him a “motherfucker” and does it her way. This bit tells you who the real writer, director is and producer is. 

Irwin Allen was a writer for the TV series Lost in Space with Angela Cartwright. He produced The Towering Inferno (’74) with O.J. Simpson and The Poseidon Adventure (’72) with Leslie Nielsen, Stella Stevens, Roddy McDowall, Gene Hackman and Pamela Sue Martin. The Lady in Red (’79) stars Pamela Sue Martin as the woman who’s red dress points the finger of death at John Dillinger. Robert Forster is a hitman.  

In the first Smoking Gun, I drew my clues to the Bundy killer’s identity through the baseline assumption that the killer’s primary motive was to draw attention to himself. That’s how political assassins did it but they usually ended up the way Adam Grant did in “Shadow Play.” Melvin Purvis did it by using “The Lady in Red” to kill a “Public Enemy.”  

The idea of getting good publicity by killing people is not new. You see it every time a prosecutor seeking the death penalty wins the case, a judge sentences a criminal to die, a governor signs the death warrant and a prison warden carries out the sentence. When cops plant evidence to start this process or shoot a suspect to death “in the line of duty” you get the same result – as long as the person they do it to looks despicable. The trick, therefore, is to assassinate the image of the accused first. You can collect all the incriminating evidence you need in advance. You can establish motive, means and opportunity. You can then kill anyone you choose as long as the evidence matches the image of the accused. 

If you have skeletons in your closet you can come off in the media as a victim of unfair or irrelevant allegations if you lie well enough in court. You can’t find better guidelines for playing the death card this way than in movies. You can go a long way with your composite character just by using the right combination of characters from Swamp Thing, Fear, The Face of Fear, Murderous Vision, Ricochet, Body of Evidence and When Dreams True.   By the way, the value of x in When Dreams Come True is in the Tarot card deck. It’s XIII, the death card.

Contact the author: Jasper Garrison
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