Table of Contents

Chapter 32

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The hardest part of making up a story with no basis in fact is getting time and space to go along with it….

As the opening credits of The Spider and the Fly roll you see rain beating down heavily on a city street as it does in the opening of The Resurrected and Body of Evidence. A black Lincoln Continental pulls to a stop. You hear the role of thunder as you see a close-up of a New York City license plate. In the opening credits of Bird on a Wire, you hear The Fifth Dimension singing “The Age of Aquarius,” and the sound of rolling thunder in the retracting mechanism of a prison gate. You see a close-up of a New York license plate. As the camera pans up you see beads of water from a recent rain on the body and windshield of a black Corvette.  

The Spider and the Fly camera moves up past the distinctive Continental grille. The rain on the glass distorts the image of the man inside. Somehow you know he is going to light a cigarette as the Maryland Man does with rain beating down on his black Mercedes in Murder in Greenwich and earlier with water on his windshield from a recent rain. Like the Maryland Man, the New York man lights a cigarette. 

You see the couple in the house in bed. You see the woman go to the shower. You see the man in the Lincoln watching her silhouette in the bathroom window. You see him donning his ski mask and getting out of the Lincoln with a knife in his hand and rain soaking his mask, his blue jean jacket and his leather gloves. He’s wearing a stereotypical “killer” costume. Sometimes the killer wears a black sweat suit and carries a gun. Sometimes he wears latex gloves. Sometimes he wears a cowboy hat or a baseball cap. When he isn’t wearing rubber-soled shoes, you can bet he’s wearing cowboy boots with distinctive toes and heels.  

Blood on a killer’s dark leather gloves is hard to see. You know it’s there only by the blood that it contacts during or after the murder. If a film director wants to make a dramatic point of connecting bloody gloves to a killer he uses tan leather, white linen or white latex because the red stain shows up better on camera. Dark leather has a natural sheen and hides the color. Blood on dark leather only makes it shinier. So does water.

If you followed the O.J. case you know that the Bundy murders occurred on June 12, 1994. You know that The Spider and the Fly was released in 1994 but you don’t know the month and day. When you see the open door, the wet shoeprints, the killer’s mask in his gloved hand near his victim’s feet, you figure that it must have been made after the Bundy murders. It looks too much like a case of art imitating life. Then again, you have seen all of these elements in various combinations so many times in the movies, you can’t be sure. 52 Pick-up gives you not only a killer in a ski mask and wet shoeprints but also the shoes of a man implicated in a murder planted in a pool of blood. Investigation of a Citizen gives you the killer’s bloody shoeprints.  

After the preview showing of The Spider and the Fly a friend of Michaels asks him what he thought. Michael tells him that he didn’t have to think. When you see the man in the Lincoln smoking a cigarette as he looks up at the house, you know that he is waiting for a signal. When the light comes on in the bathroom and you see the woman’s silhouette, you know that is the signal. You know that the Lincoln man and the woman in the shower are partners in crime. You know that he is going to kill the man in bed and she is going to kill him. You know that you are looking at a combination of Double Indemnity, and Body Heat.   

That’s why Michael didn’t have to think. Whether or not he read Dianna’s book he knew what was going to happen because he knew the source material, he know the writer’s M/O and he had time to put everything in the right order. He didn’t have to think because everything falls into place automatically. He sees that Dianna has bypassed the intellect of her audience by serving up goodies to appease their basest appetites. They want firm breast; she gives them firm breasts. They want a man they despise to die; she kills him. They want a heroine with the guts to do what they wished they could do; she gives them that heroine. Her movie is what this movie should be, an erotic thriller.  

When Michael’s housekeeper tells him that a police detective wants to talk to him, he doesn’t question the man’s credentials, as he probably would have if he had opened the door. His housekeeper told him he was a police detective, he looks like one and he behaves like one. The man gives him shocking news about the murder of a man he wanted to kill and asks questions that put him on the defensive. Everything happens so quickly that he doesn’t have time to think anything through. He even accepts the absurd idea that the window in his study “must have come open” when the only way it could have opened is if someone lifted it.  

The idea that Dianna might be play-acting her perfect murder scenario with the cooperation of someone Michael knows and someone he doesn’t know, never seeps into his thought. He’s too busy ducking the flurry of emotional punches coming at him from left and right to see anything but the evidence piling up in front of him. He knows that Dianna has framed him for a murder she committed but she seems to have thought of everything including the tiny hole in the bloody latex glove that would account for the speck of blood on the clock hand. He handled the gun and got the cut before he proposed the game. Consequentially, everything he sees and hears checks out as real – until the “detective” pushes him to the door reading him his rights and he sees Erwin Stroud grinning at him on the other side.  

Erwin opens the door. In come Helen and Blair smiling at the success of the practical joke. Dianna introduces Michael to the “detective,” who is really her brother Evan. The “arrest” becomes a party. Michael takes his defeat in good humor and everyone appears to be in a good mood when it’s time to leave – everyone, that is, except Dianna’s brother Evan.  

Dianna stays behind with Michael. Evan offers to follow her home. It sounds, at first, like a reasonable offer. But when she tells him she is fine he keeps pushing.  It’s clear that she wants to be alone with Michael but Evan doesn’t seem to understand. She finally has to order him to leave. He makes an unconvincing show of leaving willingly. Michael and Dianna fall into a double hip and lip lock. They strip off each other’s clothes.   Dianna wearing only her bra and panties climbs on top of Michael to claim her prize. As Michael unhooks her bra, the camera pans to the window where flashes of lightening reveal Evan outside in the rain looking sullenly at his sister with another man. You see a jealous man sexually obsessed with his sister.

Later that night when the rain has stopped and Michael is in his bathrobe, Dianna kisses him goodnight, explaining that she has to get up early.  

Yes, Dianna did frame Michael for a murder she committed but the murder was imaginary. She only created the illusion of reality by planting an image of a police car in front of his house. Blair created the illusion that the police had his blood type by suggesting to him that they checked his medical records. Erwin did his part by doing nothing. The ugly scene he had with Michael a few days earlier was enough. No one was acting then. As Dianna explains to the real lead detective Mose Turner after someone really kills Erwin the way she kills him in Michael’s game, “The best lies always have a grain of truth.” That’s why she used her personal management contract with Irwin in the game. It gave her a motive to kill him as Michael’s game rules required. 

You see the actual murder from the killer’s perspective after Dianna leaves Michael. Erwin is alone in his office. An unexpected visitor startles him but he recovers when he sees who it is. He jokes, “Are you trying to kill me?” The visitor shoots him twice in the chest. The impact of the bullets slams Erwin against the window. He slides to the floor leaving a big blood smear on the glass.  

You get a glimpse of a man’s shoes and trousers as the killer nearly touches the silencer on the barrel of the gun to Erwin’s spine and pulls the trigger. The scene ends with the killer’s hand in a latex glove pulling the plug on Erwin’s clock, stopping it at 10:31, the actual time of the murder. By creating the illusion that the killer tampered with the time, the killer buries the truth in a lie producing the same effect. You can’t trust anything you see. A woman might have worn the shoes and trousers or used a man as her murder weapon. You have evidence pointing to everyone who played the game. The nine-millimeter bullets in the body came from Dianna’s gun but she reported the gun stolen before the murder. Anyone who knew about the game could have stolen it.  

In the scene following the murder Kim Coats as Det. John Deluca is kneeling beside Erwin’s body taking notes. It’s daylight. You see a long blood smear where it looks like Erwin dragged himself and pulled the plug on the clock before he expired. A queasy young photographer is taking photos and trying to hold his lunch while Deluca tells him a story about his first homicide. He goes into graphic details about slipping in the victim’s blood, rolling around in the gore and later reaching in his pocket for his key and pulling out “this stuff….” 

Frankie Faison as Det. Turner walks into the room sipping coffee and getting a quick rundown on what happened. Before Deluca can finish his story the photographer beats a retreat. Deluca asks Turner where he went. Turner jokes, “To join the Fire Department.” Turner is not satisfied with the evidence. He wants to know “how a man with his spine blown in half can crawl across a twenty foot room.” You well see later from the crucifix on the wall of Turner’s office that he is Catholic. His presence gives you a Catholic, a Jew and a black man on the murder scene. He doesn’t step in Erwin’s blood but it looks for a moment that he is about to.  

Let's pause here to review The Spider and the Fly parallels to the Bundy murders, combining the movie within a movie evidence and the hoax evidence with the “real” evidence on Bundy and Rockingham… 

The Spider and The Fly movie within a movie gives us an open door, a Lincoln (Abe Lincoln on a penny), a double homicide, a knife, a killer’s shoeprints, a leather glove and a ski mask near a male victim’s feet. The hoax gives us a celebrity suspect, a “speck of blood,” blood matching the suspect; blood on a “turn dial,” a nine-millimeter pistol, a stopped clock and a bloody glove. The “real” murder gives us a Catholic, a Jew, a black man, a man who steps in blood on a grisly murder scene reaching into his pocket for keys and pulling out a murdered man’s gore (Lincoln), and the Fire Department.  

The front door of Nicole Simpson’s condo was open. Her Swiss Army watch had a large face with a minute and an hour hand. Something or someone stopped it at 10:03. Ron Goldman was Jewish. Nicole was Catholic. A Fire Department EMS worker pronounced Ron and Nicole dead. The killer stepped in the victims’ blood leaving shoeprints in Det. Fuhrman’s size and drops of blood on the scene later identified as O.J.’s.  Fuhrman found a bloody fingerprint on a “turn knob,” a “spec of blood” on O.J.’s Bronco, a small piece of plastic near a bloody glove and a “ski mask.” He noted possible gunshot wounds and he explained the coins on the ground (a dime and penny) that he had a photographer take a picture of as falling from the killer’s pocket when he reached for his keys.  

The full photo of Det. Fuhrman pointing to the bloody glove on Bundy shows the gun in his holster. Like Dianna Taylor’s, it’s a nine-millimeter pistol. While he is on the murder scene looking at Ron Goldman’s body he says in Murder in Brentwood that he joked with his lieutenant.  

The Spider and the Fly doesn’t give you enough information to know when Dianna decided to kill Erwin and frame Michael. But the scene in her Jaguar with her nine-millimeter pistol gives you a rough idea of how she planned to do it. That scene also tells you in retrospect that she had already worked out a plan and she was looking for the right time, the right place and the right patsy to pull it off. That’s how she came up with her perfect murder scenario so quickly. She had already done her homework for the basic requirements and Michael’s game suggestion gave her the perfect cover to pull it off. After all, it was his idea.  

Sifting through the evidence of O.J. Simpson’s guilt, you get a lot of it from Nicole in the ’89 incident with the photos of her face, her collar, her arm and her version of what happened. Despite the prosecution’s claim that Nicole called 911, evidence that O.J.’s housekeeper Michelle made the call is much stronger. The evidence is stronger that Nicole attacked Michelle, Michelle screamed, slapped Nicole and Nicole hung up the phone. The evidence says Michelle, rather than O.J. fought with Nicole, slapping, punching, scratching and pulling her hair. No one bothered to get Michelle’s story or check for cuts and bruises on her body. No one bothered to see if the mud stain from a recent rain on the side of Nicole’s white pants matched the ground outside of Michelle’s bungalow door. 

The bruise on Nicole’s forehead and collar squares with O.J.’s account of wrestling her out of their bedroom. The bruise on her arm squares with the responding officer’s account of Michelle trying to pull her out of the squad car. The ’89 911 call has a long open line with no one saying anything until you hear a woman’s scream, a slap and a grunt. There is no male voice on the tape and no identification of the caller.  

When the police arrived Nicole was hiding in the bushes wearing only a bra and pants. She stayed hidden until the senior officer announced that he wasn’t going to leave until he saw the woman who was “beaten.” Looking at everything, including Nicole’s delay in running to the police officer sobbing and claiming that O.J. was going to shoot her, you get a hoax. You get a story improvised to fit what Nicole now knew the cops expected to see when they got the call. She gave only the responding officers the impression the she was afraid for her life.  When the police were gone she gave Al Cowlings the impression she was angry. 

Mark Fuhrman is a very smart guy. I have no doubt that he figured out what happened and decided to use it in a plan to put himself in the international spotlight. My “epiphany” came when I tried to test this idea on other people and discovered that I couldn’t even get people to think about it. They didn’t have to think. They saw and heard enough to convince them that O.J. beat his wife and lied about it. The End. 

All of the evidence against O.J. Simpson fits the same pattern. You see it in Michael Moore’s response to the news that Irwin was murdered, an emotional response that robbed him of his ability to make rational distinctions between reality and fiction. Michael sees a NYPD detective without a partner. Okay. A window slides up. Okay. A cop car that he doesn’t see is outside. When Michael sees the evidence against him he knows that Dianna killed Erwin before he knows that Erwin is dead.  

When Deluca and Turner appear at Helen Stroud’s door to tell her that her husband has been murdered, she laughs. She knows that Erwin isn’t dead. She knows that his murder was just a game. She doesn’t ask for the detectives’ identification until the “joke” stops being funny. Erwin’s killer knows that the things people know in any situation aren’t what move them to choose one course of action over another. It’s what they believe they know. That’s why Dianna tells Det. Turner that the best lies have some truth in them.  Obvious truths make lies easy to accept and hard to dispel. 

If the evidence against Michael had implicated someone else he would have believed it because he believed that no one would attempt to pull off a frame like that in real life. It would be too obvious. That’s why it would work. Nobody would entertain the possibility that it was staged long enough to work through the evidence. All rational thought stops at the instant of conviction. From there on the goal becomes to prove the conviction or to defend it, to reorder the evidence until it fits and to dismiss evidence that doesn’t. The evidence against O.J. did just that.  

What Dianna did to Michael in the game was easy. She just used the elements available to her to fill in details of a plan she already made. She used real incidents and movie clichés that nobody takes seriously. These movie clichés work in reality because of established psychological principles. But to make them work you have to reconfigure time as Fuhrman did in Murder in Greenwich to break Michael Skakel’s alibi. That’s how Dianna was able to destroy Michael Moore’s alibi. That’s how Mark Fuhrman gave himself two alibis for the Bundy murders.  

Fuhrman said he left the police union seminar, about 150 miles from the murder scene around 8:00, just before the barbeque started. He said that he stopped to get gas and a soft drink about an hour’s drive from his home. Nobody saw him but he said he paid with a credit card. This was his second alibi for the “flexible” timeline he argued in Murder in Brentwood that Marcia Clark should have used because, among other things, people’s  “watches or clocks are set differently.” His time range, as opposed to timeline, is 10:00 to 10:45.  

In The Spider and the Fly, Colm Feore as Dianna’s brother Evan tells a detective that he left Michael’s home around 8:00 and went to bed (Fuhrman’s first alibi). Det. Kimura, trying to confirm his alibi asks him if anyone saw him, if he “stopped for a drink, to get gas, cigarettes.” He didn’t. Even this wouldn’t be so much if Evan wasn’t wearing a leather jacket and he didn’t look so much like Christopher Meloni and the detective wasn’t the one who proposed the drink/gas station alibi.

If you need a credit card or a soft drink in the hands of that detective, you get something very close to both within the following two minutes.  

The camera swings to the next cubical where Capt. Perez is questioning Helen Stroud. She orders her lawyer to get her a cup of coffee with extra Sweet & Low. The Captain volunteers to get it for her and uses the errand to call his three detectives together in a work break area. Deluca, who interviewed Blair Delaney, the new CEO of the company, thinks she did it. Kimura, who interviewed Evan, believes that his sister Dianna did it.  Perez and Turner don’t know what to think. Turner says, “They all have motive. They all have opportunity. No one has an alibi and they’re all glad he’s dead.” He says this while eating a donut as Kimura goes to the soft drink machine to get a Pepsi.

The “credit card” comes in the form of a wager – a promise to pay a debt and the authority to collect it when the bill comes due. Deluca bets five dollars that Blair did it. Kimura’s money is on Dianna. Kimura represents the credit card holder and the credit card company because he gets something for his money – a soft drink and more money.  

Kimura figures that Dianna is going to take the money she makes from the murder and skip to Barbados. Turner doesn’t see it that way. He says, “Whoever did it knew they would be under the spotlight… They enjoyed it.” He got the right profile, the profile of the man who murdered Ron Goldman and Nicole Simpson. But he fixed on the wrong suspect.  

Perez tells Det. Turner to interview Michael. Turner is deceptively intelligent. He doesn’t let on that he caught Michael in a lie, but you know that he did by the way his intelligence works against him as he begins to lean toward Michael as his prime suspect.  

Remember the Murder in Greenwich scene where Stephen Weeks calls Fuhrman a gumshoe? You see a close-up of the car wheel. You hear Fuhrman and Weeks talking about Martha’s murder. You see Fuhrman fold a copy of the Greenwich Bulletin newspaper with his photo next to a photo of O.J. wearing the leather gloves over latex gloves. You see the headline, “Disgraced Cop to Write Book on Moxley Murder.”

Fuhrman’s disgrace, of course, was his lie on the witness stand. The Spider and the Fly gives you the following in 34 seconds: Michael lies to Turner. Turner chews gum. You see a close-up of a car wheel. Then you see shoes. You see Dianna wearing leather gloves, a man wearing dark gloves and looking at a newspaper, two cops talking and an angry woman snatching a “bulletin” off a telephone pole.  

Here, I must confess that I’ve painted myself into a corner. I tried to cut as much as possible from every film and TV reference beginning in chapter 1. Still, I ended up with more than I could accommodate in the six chapters I had reserved to put them in. Under Suspicion, A Touch of Scandal, I, Madman, False Witness, another episode of Columbo and Matlock all had to go. I could barely touch on the incest links and interracial sex links in any movie, particularly the incest link in The Hotel New Hampshire to the sibling fight scene in Murder in Greenwich. Trust me, it was biggie.  

So as not to leave you hanging with The Spider and the Fly, I’ll fill you in on some things you might be wondering about….  

Erwin Stroud’s hold on Dianna was her identity. She tells Michael she is from Washington State and a cut on her back is from a car accident. She is really Lisa Ann Samples from Oregon. She was convicted of murdering her husband Jimmy in a “domestic argument” but received a suspended sentence because wounds on her face and body indicated that her husband cut and beat her. The audience knows that her husband didn’t beat her. Her jealous brother did. You see him in her upstairs window slapping her face, tossing her on a couch and jumping on her. Evan might have pulled the trigger but in the end, she showed that she could have used him as her weapon or done it herself – and enjoyed it.  

The Spider and the Fly’s only weakness is the censorship imposed on any movie produced for commercial TV. There are no nude scenes when they are called for to give a visceral impression of the sexual chemistry between characters who are supposed to be driven by sexual obsession. The movie has the writer of steamy erotic thrillers like Body Heat, Jagged Edge and Basic Instinct shout in anger, “You’re sleeping with her!” It has adults about to do the nasty talking like teenagers being closely observed by Southern Baptist church ladies. It’s a 90-minute movie with a 2-hour scope truncated to make room for commercials.  

Time talks because time, place and action are inseparable. If the action doesn’t fit the time and place it can’t be real. It can’t even be realistic.   

Where and when Michael finds computer disks the killer stole to frame him for Blair’s murder tells him who the killer has to be. In fact or fiction time has to agree with action. An alibi is only an alibi if the suspect doesn’t have time to be where the crime happened when it happened. If you animate the various stories of Allan Park spotting Kato and O.J., you get two stories that agree with phone record time stamps, Kato’s and O.J.’s. Any variation of Marcia Clark’s story, Allan Park’s or Fuhrman’s give you O.J. and Kato seeing each other or passing through each other like phantoms. Time and space give O.J. an alibi. They give Fuhrman the opportunity to commit the murders on Bundy and to frame O.J. on Bundy and Rockingham. The means come from film and television. 

Compare Mark Fuhrman’s picture on Rockingham with the death card in When Dreams Come True. You will see that the value of x in Murder in Greenwich is not in what the gardener says about Michael Skakel. It’s in Fuhrman’s words on the McKinney taps, his pictures on Bundy and Rockingham and what he did there on June 13. His boasts of getting away with murder agree with the time, space and money motive for committing the Bundy murders and putting himself in the publicity spotlight. Consider this Spider and the Fly exchange between Michael and Diana:  

Michael: Your heroine is a serial killer with no redeeming qualities except firm breasts…you choose to explore the baser sensibilities of human nature with no sense of justice or moral perspective. 

Dianna: Don’t tell me you are one of those zealots who believe film and television give people grisly ideas. 

Michael: I live in New York.  

Translation: Michael has seen it happen… So have you.

Contact the author: Jasper Garrison
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