Charlie's Angels

During most of its five-year run, Charlie’s Angels featured Jaclyn Smith (’76-’81), Kate Jackson (’76-’79), and Cheryl Ladd (’77-’81). Farrah Fawcett as Jill Monroe, was one of the original Angels and one of the most popular. She was so popular that she left the show after the first season to pursue other acting opportunities. One of her most memorable performances was that of the abused wife and mother in The Burning Bed (’80)

Farrah Fawcett was replaced by Cheryl Ladd as her younger sister Kris. When Kate Jackson left the show in 1980 Shelly Hack took her place. She got such bad reviews for her role as Tiffany Welles that the casting directors replaced her with Tanya Roberts after her first season. Fortunately for Shelly Hack, other casting directors looked more favorably upon her as an actress and she appeared in many other television and movie roles. She is Cathy Long in King of Comedy (’83) and Dr. Beth Gilbert in the ’83 TV series Cutter to Houston. In the made for television movie Kicks (’85) she’s Maggie. In another made for television movie A Casualty of War (’90) she’s Monica. She has a small part in Time After Time (’79) and a leading role as the wife of The Stepfather (’87).

The Stepfather has too many links to Fuhrman and the Bundy murders to get into here so I won’t even start. The point is, apart from an episode of Charlie’s Angel’s where Shelly Hack has a leading role in a ghost story, she has numerous connections to Mark Fuhrman and his version of the Bundy Murders.

We’ve already seen enough about Tanya Roberts to know how she fits into the composite picture of Mark Fuhrman’s association with the Bundy murders. We’ve seen enough to know how much her role in Sins of Desire have to do with Monica Lewinsky’s sexual preference, her blue dress and the impeachment of President Bill Clinton. We need only remember that angels and the name Roberts loom large in the Fuhrman collection and Tanya Roberts was one of Charlie’s Angels.

Jaclyn Smith as Kelly Gerrett is a key figure in the story of the lost and found glasses outside of the Brentwood Mezzaluna restaurant. She is a key figure in the alleged note on Nicole’s coffee table, her lost key and Fuhrman’s discovery of the Rockingham glove with his flashlight. She also figures into the traffic in drugs surrounding Nicole, Faye Resnick, Ron Shipp, Denise Brown, Ron Goldman and the Mezzaluna restaurant. You will find allusions to all of these things in the 1979 "Avenging Angel" episode of Charlie’s Angels.

"Avenging Angel" is about an ex-convict who blames the ordeal of his incarceration on Kelly, the LAPD arresting officer in his case and the star witness at his trial four years earlier. Camron Mitchell is Frank, the ex-con. Frank is a former heroin addict who had a habit before he went to prison (Faye Resnick has a $300-a-day cocaine habit before she went into rehab). He suffered traumatic withdrawals when he was forced to quit cold turkey. Unknown to the authorities, he hid two million dollars worth of heroin and hatched a brilliant plan to use some of it for his revenge.

With the help of his loyal friend Eddie he sets his plan into motion to systematically turn Kelly into a junky without her knowledge. Eddie gets a job behind the counter at a diner Kelly frequents, somehow makes a copy of the key to her house and gets a job for Frank as a dishwasher. Frank drugs Kelly’s coffee. Eddie serves it to her. She returns home, parks her car at an angle to the curb (greater than O.J.'s Bronco photographed on Rockingham) and goes straight to bed.

The angle of the parked car means nothing in itself so you know more is coming. Would you believe two men in the dark, one wearing only one leather glove and the other shining a flashlight on that glove? In Iago in Brentwood I make the case that Mark Fuhrman’s partner planted the Rockingham glove that Fuhrman "discovered" with his flashlight after Fuhrman used the excuse of how O.J.’s Bronco was parked to lead him step by step into the Rockingham estate. In the "Avenging Angel" episode of Charlie’s Angels, Camron Mitchell as Frank and his partner Eddie use Kelly’s stolen key to get into her house.

Remember that Nicole’s key was stolen and Fuhrman used the parking angle of the Bronco as his key to Kato’s room – where he was sleeping – and to use Kato’s story of the thumps to find the glove. Remember that Fuhrman said he thought Kato looked like he was high on something, suggesting that he thought Kato had been using drugs. Remember that Fuhrman made an issue of the items on Nicole’s coffee table. From those items he concluded that she had been talking on the telephone just before she saw O.J., got a butcher knife from her kitchen and went outside to confront him. Remember that Fuhrman checked the bottom of Kato’s shoe and concluded that they were too small to have left the bloody shoeprints on Bundy.

Remember that in "Avenging Angel" Kelly’s car is parked at an angle to the curb in front of her house while Frank and Eddie are inside setting her up for a big fall. On the way to Kelly’s bedroom where the drug that Frank slipped into her coffee at the restaurant has knocked her out, Eddie bumps into her coffee table. In the bedroom Frank tests her to make sure that she will not awaken from her drug-induced sleep. He then injects heroine into the bottom of her foot and steals her wallet to make sure that she returns to the restaurant the next day.

In Iago in Brentwood I argue that Juditha brown’s glasses were stolen and left outside where they could be easily found to make sure that Ron Goldman’s appearance at Bundy would look like a case of bad timing. In "Avenging Angel" Eddie calls the Townsend Detective Agency to report that he found Kelly’s wallet outside of the restaurant in the parking lot. Mezzaluna did not have a parking lot. A woman working behind the bar at the restaurant found the glasses on the curb next to where Lou Brown parked the car that brought his party from Dana Point to the restaurant.

In The Naked Gun 2 ½ the police find the killer’s wallet by the curb next to a bar and restaurant like Mezzaluna where Frank Drebin meets Jane. Frank is on the scene in the fourth episode of Police Squad! where Norberg (who was replaced by O.J. as Nordberg) finds a book of matches intentionally left next to a curb.

We have already established the link between Fuhrman and Frank Drebin but there are also some significant links between Fuhrman and Camron Mitchell, the man who plays Frank in "The Avenging Angel." One of those links is Fuhrman’s use of the n-word on the Laura Hart McKinny tapes when he is describing how easy it is to abuse black suspects. Another is his clash with Margaret York over the KKK written over Martin Luther King’s birthday on a calendar. In The Klansman (’74) with O.J. Simpson as Garth, Mitchell is a Klansman who, of course, uses the n-word. He is a federal officer in Slaughter who also uses the n-word. That’s what he calls Jim Brown.

In "Avenging Angel," Kelly Garrett awakens the next morning feeling out of sorts. She gets a phone call from Kris who tells her about an important appointment that she has that morning. Kelly tells her about the cold that she thinks she’s coming down with and asks her to have some orange juice (O.J.) ready for her when she gets in. Before she leaves her house she notices that her coffee table is slightly out of place and moves it back to where it belongs. On the coffee table is a telephone.

I’m sure that you’ve noticed by now how certain aspects of Fuhrman’s story about the Bundy murders are concentrated in certain movies or television shows and how often some themes are repeated. One scene in one movie has a white Bronco on a railroad track another has a Bronco, but not a white one, parked at a noticeable angle. Still another has a white van with something stuck in the undercarriage of the front end. You have cars of all makes and models stopping abruptly and something (including a stick) being slung forward because of the sudden stop. We’ve seen blood on the handle of a white van, blood on the inside of cars, bleeding killers jumping into our out of cars, chauffeur-driven limousines standing by to pick up someone in a hurry, etc.

If Fuhrman’s story really matched the evidence of Bundy and Rockingham all of this would be irrelevant. What makes it relevant is the fact that it doesn’t. The only place you will see all of these things is on television or in the movies.

Just about the only thing we haven’t seen is a vehicle coming to a sudden stop at an angle to the curb, someone jumping out, running around the back, up a driveway and heading for the front door of a house. "Avenging Angel" has all of that. Kelly is on the phone with her associates when former associates of Frank come into her house and drag her away in a chauffeur-driven limousine. Charlie Townsend’s only male detective, John Bosley (O.J. is John Walker in Capricorn One) pulls his Ford Thunderbird to a sudden stop at an angle to the curb, leaps out, runs around the back, up the driveway and across the lawn to Kelly’s front door. Kris and Tiffany arrive at the house in a white Ford Mustang. In a later scene you see Kris and Tiffany in their Mustang passing a Toyota truck parked the way O.J. pared his Bronco about two feet in front of a driveway.

For a one-hour show, you have to admit that’s quite a bit of material for a composite picture of Mark Fuhrman’s story about O.J.’s Ford Bronco and the limo that picked him up on the 12^th of June 1994.

Like Jaclyn Smith and Farrah Fawcett, Kate Jackson as Sabrina Duncan was one of the original Angels in Charlie’s Angels. She was the original TV star who joined the show after her role as a nurse married to a rookie cop in The Rookies. One of her co-stars was Georg Stanford Brown, the black actor and director you saw as a "gust star" and a director in Police Squad!. He directed a few episodes of Charlie’s Angels and quite a few episodes of Scarecrow and Mrs. King, another series starring Kate Jackson.

Georg Stanford Brown was married to white actress Tyne Daily who starred with Meg Foster in Cagney and Lacy. Meg Foster is the original Lacy. Tyne Daily is Cagney, the character modeled after Mark Fuhrman’s nemesis in the LAPD, Margaret York. That should tell you all you need to know about the likely associations Mark Fuhrman made to Kate Jackson.

Following the tradition of Barbara Felden as Agent 99 in Get Smart, Jaclyn Smith and Farrah Fawcett got their shot at acting in a popular television series by way of their popularity in TV ads. They did not become full-fledged television stars until they appeared in Charlie’s Angels. Likewise for Cheryl Ladd, as Kris Monroe. She got her big break in television by doing toothpaste commercials. I devoted a whole chapter to her in The Smoking Gun as Louise Baltimore in Millennium (’89) the time travel movie with Kris Kristofferson. When you see Cheryl Ladd think: Bloody shoe; blood glove; the stun technique (used to disorient Ron and incapacitate Nicole); flight attendants (like the flight attendant in "Twenty Two" and Airplane!); and time shifting.

Given the negative association that Fuhrman would have surely made to Kate Jackson, you would not expect to see many links to him in the series because he is not likely to have watched that many of the shows. Kate Jackson appeared in most of them. One the other hand, the ones he did watch must have left a big impact on him relative to the Bundy murders because of the number and the specificity of the links that are present in them.

Few episodes of Charlie’s Angels with Kate Jackson have enough links to Fuhrman and the Bundy murders to count. "Avenging Angel" (’79) is not an exception to the rule because Kate Jackson is not in it. There are exceptions, though, three of them. The six seasons of Get Smart, by comparison, has four (in one episode), while Remington Steel and Moonlighting have only a dozen or so episodes out of more than six dozen apiece that don’t have several of them.

The common denominator in the Charlie’s Angels episodes with many links to Fuhrman is Cheryl Ladd. In a show where the Angels go undercover as football players she even makes a reference to O.J. Simpson. Like O.J. One of the team members is dyslexic. This 1978 episode is directed by Georg Stanford Brown and it stars L. Q. Jones as a retired pro football player who has been persuaded by his daughter to coach her team. In a 1979 episode featuring Cheryl Ladd and Farrah Fawcett in a guest appearance as Jill Monroe, L.Q. Jones is an escaped convict who murdered his wife in a jealous rage. The links to O.J. and Peggy Lipton’s former husband Quincy Jones obviously need no explanation.

To see why Cheryl Ladd would stand out so much in Fuhrman’s mind, it would help to review the links to Tessa Richarde in Bronco Billy and Cat People starring Quincy Jones’ former lover Nastassia Kinski. Remember that Shannon Tweed is Audrey in Last Call (see Chapter 11) with William (Billy) Kat and Stella Stevens. Now see what you can make of the opening segment of Charlie’s Angels with someone throwing knives around Cheryl Ladd's head. Pay particular attention to the knife next to her neck and the choker around her throat. It would also help to note how much Cheryl sounds like Sherilyn and to remember that Sherilyn Fenn is Audrey in Twin Peaks.

Twin Peaks again…

In the "Mother Goose is Running for His Life" episode of Charlie’s Angels the Angels go undercover to investigate sabotage at Mother Goose Toy Company. The company is owned by a white-haired man named Leland Swinnerton. In the opening scene Leland is playing with an electric train when he gets a call from someone who wants to buy the company. He insists that he won’t sell. When he hangs up the model train rounds the tracks and explodes. That’s when he calls the Townsend Detective Agency.

The mystery caller is a mobster named Phalan. He wants to buy the company as a front for his illegal enterprises. Phalan hires a surveillance expert named Larry Wilkes to bug Leland’s design room. Dressed in dark clothes and wearing glasses and black leather gloves Wilkes breaks into the design room at night and gets shot in the chest by a toy cannon rigged to fire a small caliber bullet.

Like the story of Ronald Goldman, who was supposed to have been killed because of the glasses he carried to Bundy when O.J. was attacking Nicole, Larry Wilkes is the victim of bad timing. Clifford David as a Mother Goose toy designer named Gordon Roclair (in Twin Peaks David Lynch is Gordon) is the man responsible for killing Larry Wilkes. His intended target was Leland Swinnerton.

Roclair is secretly working for Phalan the mobster but he has a hidden agenda of his own. He believes that the Mother Goose Toy Company is going out of business (like the Packard Mill in Twin Peaks). To assure his own future success he wants to market a line of toys that include a little guillotine that chops off little heads and a driving game where the object is to collect points by hitting pedestrians. All he needs is a financial backer, which is why he threw in with Phalan. Sabrina, posing as a representative of her father, a wealthy industrialist in Hong Kong (like Eckhardt in Twin Peaks) pretends to go along with him.

Phalan doesn’t trust Roclair, which is why he hired Wilkes. So he hires another electronics surveillance expert to take the place of Wilkes, an Englishman named Jack Orwell. Naturally, Phalan doesn’t tell Orwell how Wilkes died. Instead, he makes up a story about Wilkes and his girlfriend Donna (as in Donna Hayward in Twin Peaks). He says that Wilkes and Donna got into a fight and she shot him.

Bobbie Jordan as Donna is one of the few mourners at Wilkes’ funeral although her main concern seems to be that his death means he can no longer pay her bills. Like Faye Resnick (Miss Hayward) Donna is a very mercenary woman. For five-hundred dollars she tells Kelly and Kris about her former boyfriend’s ties to Phalan. Armed with that information, Kris literally drops in on Phalan when he’s taking to Orwell by pretending to have gone off course in a hang glider. When the Angels find out who Orwell is they have enough to piece together who is doing what at Mother Goose and why.

To have pulled off the murders of Ron Goldman and Nicole Simpson and the image assassination of O.J. Simpson in a way that is consistent with the evidence, convert surveillance was a must. The killer would have required inside contacts like Faye Resnick, Denise Brown and Ron Shipp. The use of sophisticated electronic surveillance equipment was not essential but it would have been useful and it was well within the capability of Mark Fuhrman to procure, to plant and to monitor.

When Kelly gets into trouble with Orwell, Bosley is in his car listening in on everything they say because of a bug planted in the ceiling of Orwell’s van. Orwell orders Kelly and gunpoint to drive away. Bosley follows. Stopped at a red light Kelly sees a motorcycle cop and blows through the light, nearly hitting another vehicle. The cop gives case. Orwell throws the gun out of the window. Bosley brings is car to an abrupt halt at an angel to the curb and picks up the gun on the parkway in front of his car.

Fuhrman didn’t invent the story of O.J. driving through a red light in his Bronco nearly hitting another vehicle but he sure adopted it. It’s an integral part of his story of O.J. fleeing from Bundy and bringing his Bronco to an abrupt halt, thus slinging the stick forward and off to the side onto the Rockingham parkway. It is the same thing the Bundy killer did with bits and pieces of the movies and television shows like Charlie’s Angels.

The last item of interest in "Mother Goose is Running for His Life" has to do with Mark Fuhrman’s discovery of the bubble gum on Bundy. It also involves the tiny rag doll he had photographed on the bloody tiles inside the gate together with the poem about mothers with the purple flowers (Quincy Jones/The Color Purple) behind it and the larkspur in front. One more thing to look for is the principle that makes it easy to get any blood sample to test positive for the person you want it to identify….

Leland has secretly developed a line of toys for the Christmas season that is certain to put the Mother Goose Company in the black. Sabrina shows the plans to the murderous toy designer Roclair in a plot to make him look like he’s trying to double-cross the mobster Phalan. Kris Monroe is in the design room with them posing as a big rag doll with red, rag-mop hair. Roclair is so distracted by the designs that he doesn’t notice her. He puts the blueprints in a cardboard cylinder (blood samples in coin envelopes on Bundy) and sets them aside. While he is busy with other tasks, Kris switches his cylinder with an identical one containing phony prints.

Roclair picks up Kris’ cylinder and sends them to Phalan. He then loads the toy cannon and arms it to fire when someone steps through the door. Kris sees everything. So will you when you see her chewing and blowing a bubble. You know that the bubble gum is going to come out of her mouth. You see it coming when Roclair calls Phalan and tells him to meet him in the design room. When Phalan discovers that the plans he has are for a vacuum cleaner and a blender he goes to Mother Goose to kill Roclair. They get into a gun battle. Roclair panics and runs into his own trap. The gun goes off and he faints, thinking that he has been shot. He hasn’t. Kris spiked the barrel of the cannon with her bubble gum.

In the final scene, Leland presents the Angels with tiny dolls that look just like them.

In the course of researching Iago in Brentwood I became convince that Mark Fuhrman was a gambler who sometimes won and lost big. I was, therefore, anything but surprised to see that Los Vegas has an important part in Fuhrman’s book Murder in Brentwood. This is where his investigation of the black retired Army sergeant whose body was found in the trunk of a car led him between O.J.’s two trials. Los Vegas is where the "Rat Pack" composed of Frank Sinatra, Joey Bishop, Peter Lawford and Sammy Davis Junior ruled in the ’60s and the movie Ocean’s Eleven starring the Rat Pack was made. Dean Martin, who appeared with the Rat Pack in Ocean’s Eleven was a headline attraction in Vegas for many years.

Only in reviewing the previous paragraph did it strike me that the name "Sammy" might have had something to do with Fuhrman’s interest in the movie Ghost. Sam is the ghost. Frank, Joey and Peter are all common names so you would expect to see them from time to time in reviews of movies or TV shows. It’s the context in which they appear in the Fuhrman collection that makes them significant.

In The Naked Gun 2 ½ Joey Chicago is a boxer from Detroit. A real boxer from Detroit was Joe Louis, who married a white woman. In Goldie and the Boxer (’79), O.J. is a boxer named Joe. The "Dead Men Don’t Laugh/Testimony of Evil" episode of Police Squad! begins with the murder of a Los Vegas comic named Joey in a car wreck. Joey Bishop was a comic in Los Vegas and you know about Sammy Davis Jr.’s car wreck that cost him an eye.

"Angels in Vegas," has one murdered black man, one murdered white man and one murdered white woman – all killed by a truck or in a car. It has an actor named Sargent and two actors famous for their roles as sergeants in other popular TV shows. Dean Martin as Frank Howell is a former Army man who owns the Tropicna Hotel and casino. He won he casino in a craps game. His first gambling joint was in a train shed in East Philadelphia, which he nearly lost in a craps game. He decided to keep playing on a flip of a coin. The man who flipped the coin was his good friend Jip Baker. Scatman Crothers (Bronco Billy / The Shining) is Jip. Frank thinks of Jip as family – his only family.

Frank calls on the Townsend Detective Agency for help when a dancer named Mary Phillips is killed in a car crash. Shortly before her death a young parking lot attendant was run down and killed. Frank has been getting strange calls. He has found furniture in his apartment slightly out of place with no indication that anyone has taken anything. He thinks someone is systematically trying to drive him crazy. He wants to know who and why.

The Angels seize upon the opportunity to get some freebees out of the deal when Charlie decides to send them undercover at the Tropicana. Kelly suggests new clothes. Kris wants new shoes.

In part one of "Angels in Vegas" we meet Frank, Jip, and Marry. Dick Sargent (Samantha’s husband in Bewitched) is singer Marty Cole. Vic Morrow (Sgt. Saunders in Combat and the father of Jennifer Jason Leigh) is a competitor of Frank’s named Mark Hains. Michael Conrad (the roll call sergeant in Hill Street Blues) is a thug-for-hire named Ed Slocum. We learn that Marty Cole is the killer when Jip is run down by a truck and hospitalized with a cast on his arm and a bandage on his head like O.J. in The Naked Gun. Wearing rubber-soled shoes and black leather gloves, he slips into Jip’s hospital room and injects his IV with a muscle relaxant that stops his heart. He leaves shoeprints on the rug with the toes pointed straight ahead.

For her cover Kelly auditions as a dancer and gets close to Mary’s former roommate. Sabrina sticks with Frank as his "personal consultant" and Kris auditions as a singer with Marty Cole. He is struck by how much she resembles his dead wife Leslie. She drove her car off a bridge after a fight with him about his jealous accusation that she no longer wanted him and was going to have an affair with Frank. When Kris entered his rehearsal room he was singing, "I wanna be around to see how he does it when he breaks your heart to bites…That’s when I’ll discover that revenge is sweet as I sit there applauding from a front row seat…."

It should not escape your attention that Mark Fuhrman had a front row seat when O.J. was arrested for murdering Ron and Nicole. It should likewise not escape your attention that Nicole had a lot in common with Mark Fuhrman’s second wife Janet Hackett and that his proposed answer to her infidelity was multiple homicide.

The object of Marty Cole’s attacks on the people close to Frank is to make him suffer. Kris is the one who figures it out when she is with Cole, Frank is with Sabrina on a beach and someone on a boat takes a shot that comes close to Sabrina. Everyone else assumes that Frank was the intended target until Kris asks Sabrina, "But what if they were trying to hurt Frank by hurting you?"

Once the Angels know the motive they begin to zero in on the killer. Until then, Vic Morrow as Mark Hains who drives racecars for a hobby and had a secret affair with Mary looks mighty suspicious. When Kelly confronts him with her suspicions he begins to have suspicions of his own. He meets with Marty Cole at the racetrack and tells him, "You came to me and said we had something in common. We both wanted to break Frank Howell. Take everything away from him. Those were your words. That’s how you put it, right?"

Can you think of a better way to put what happened to O.J. Simpson when Nicole and Ron were murdered? I can’t.

The birthday connection with Vic Morrow spills over into another episode of Charlie’s Angels called "Little Angels of the Night" in which the Angels go undercover as prostitutes. In the last of a series of attacks on prostitutes the killer, wearing black leather gloves, strangles his victim in an elevator and leaves behind a shark tooth necklace belonging to an innocent man. Kelly and Kris go to the restaurant across the street and Kelly tells the restaurant owner Roman Vail – who happens to be the killer – how much she admired the necklace on Freddie the pizza delivery boy. She says that she wants to get one just like it for her brother’s birthday.

A psychiatrist tells the Angels that the killer fits the profile of a "Jack the Ripper" personality. The killer cannot bring himself to kill the object of his feelings so she chooses a substitute, someone who reminds him of her. In the case of Roman Vail it’s attractive blonde women of a certain height and build who remind him of his ex-wife Mary. His first victim is a blonde female named Terry Jones. He attacks a blonde name Bonnie who escapes when Kelly and Sabrina rush to her aid. Bonny is wearing a black tress with an open back. When the Angels find her she is curled on her side like Liz in Whore and Nicole Brown Simpson on Bundy.

The Angels meet two "working girls" by a swimming pool where Bonny introduces Freddy as "My pizza pusher from across the street." She has a pizza with anchovies. If you saw Lover Boy you know what anchovies mean. When you see Kris in her black, one-piece bathing suit and you know that Vail fixes on her as a substitute for his ex-wife, that should tell you something, too.

O.J. Simpson boasted of having sex with one of the Angels but he didn't say which one.

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