How can we use the movies as a basis for exploring Mark Fuhrman’s relationship to the Bundy murder victims and the accused murderer?

First, we have to establish a rational basis for concluding that he had a greater interest in movie-making than most people have. We can do that through his "chance" meeting with Laura Hart in the spring of 1985 and their nine-year collaboration on writing a screenplay and pitching it to various Hollywood producers. He didn’t just watch movies, he studied them. He asked the readers of his first book to consider the violent, racist character of the cop he said he created for himself on the McKinny tapes in light of that character's likely appeal to Hollywood producers. He called his "play-acting" persona a composite of popular on-screen cops. He moonlighted frequently as a private security cop at first run movie theaters. He made it clear that he’d seen enough movies on videotape, cable TV and on network television series to make him an outstanding candidate for a movie trivia quiz show.

Next, we have to identify a clear pattern of behavior that would show a heightened sensitivity to minor points of similarity between him and O.J Simpson as well as to the people they were close to. His violent reaction to Kathleen Bell's comparison of him and O.J.'s friend Marcus Allen purely on the basis of their similar height and build does that all by itself. But there is more. Through Murder in Brentwood we can read his admission of deliberately copying ideas from successful screenwriters and seeing himself in the role of classic screen characters. In his attempt to get an early discharge from the LAPD, the Department psychiatrists concluded that he had done extensive research on the subject of stress-related psychological disorders. Murder in Brentwood gives his readers a first-person account of how meticulous he was in his research on any project that he got involved in.

His bleeding killer theory, his analysis of the murder weapon and the painted piece of wood in front of the Bronco are all examples of the kind of super sleuthing found only in the movies. His performance on the witness stand showed an astonishing grasp of significant details that implicated Simpson and spotlighted Fuhrman as the brightest detective on the case. He went further in his book, writing about the time he invested in people-watching and the detailed mental notes he took of their demeanor, their dress and the way they walked, details vital to a detective as well as a screenwriter in telling a believable story…

By the 16th of June 1994, a day before O.J.'s arrest, it was clear to everyone that the police were bending over backward to offer the star every benefit of the doubt. They seemed to be doing so despite the fact that the evidence made available to the press left no doubt of his guilt. How could he talk his way out of blood drops running from his hastily parked Bronco into his driveway—cut or no cut on his finger? If the blood belonged to the victims it was incriminating. If the blood was his it was just as incriminating, given the blood trail leading from the murder scene to his Rockingham gate and the bloody glove the police found on Rockingham that matched the one they found on Bundy. Then there was the bloody ski mask in his room, his sudden flight to Chicago and the many 911 calls Nicole made that we hadn't heard about before.

Educated people who didn’t want to see O.J. as Silas or Gus were seeing him as Othello in the backgrounds of their minds whether they wanted to or not. There were many reminders in our everyday lives like the ever-so-brief scene in Castle Rock Entertainment’s Amos and Andrew with the woman brushing a black wig and the black man on the cell phone with the picture of Othello on his wall.

The question was whether people of all colors could imagine a scenario with a different killer—perhaps a white cop in a dark blue knit cap. Could they imagine him on a cell phone coordinating his actions with a watcher on Rockingham? Could they put aside that ridiculous story "O.J." told of cutting himself on his cell phone and imagine a killer with a knife who wasn't black or motivated to kill because of his frustrated obsession with white women? Could they imagine O.J. Simpson as anything other than a black Jekyll and Hyde? These images of O.J. came straight out of the 1989 report Mark Fuhrman made to the city attorney. Though we hadn't seen or heard that report at the time, we sure got the picture. But who was buying it?

The media were buying it. They were buying it, selling it and making their own contributions to the new O.J. image. The "cut-myself-on-my-cell-phone" story, for example, didn’t come from O.J. or Fuhrman. It came from National Public Radio commentator Judy Muller. That is, it didn’t come directly from Mark Fuhrman. Who knows where she got that damaging little lie? The point is she reported it as thought it were true at a time when she had access to information the rest of us didn’t have. She did not retract it when the Lange/Vannatter interview transcript it supposedly came from entered the public domain and exposed the lie for what it was.

To this day (June 8, 1999) she has not retracted it. To this day many people who believe O.J. is a murderer count that obvious lie someone else put into his mouth as one of many he told to hide his obvious guilt.

Muller’s cell phone story was one of many such tales told by journalists and commentators with the national and international networks covering the news. They didn’t exactly report the news. In many cases they invented it or gave it a decidedly pro-prosecution spin. They did so with a "slight" misquote here, a "minor" omission there and an open contempt for any point of view that didn’t agree with the one laid out for them on the 13^th of June by Mark Fuhrman.

While most African-Americans became increasingly suspicions of the quality of evidence they were seeing and hearing a majority of whites were convinced in the first few days by the quantity alone. The thinking went something like this: There are bound to be a few errors and loose ends with so much evidence to sift through but there was so much of it that the bad stuff doesn’t matter.

For those who shared the African-American perspective, the wrong things mattered very much because they were the kinds of wrong things that made the "right" things suspect. The motive and the method attributed to O.J. by the police and prosecutors didn't ring true. There was something wrong about the cut on O.J.'s finger that was supposed to implicate the killer but nobody saw on O.J. during his flight to Chicago. There was too much evidence that fit a stereotype of black men with white women and there was no presumption of innocence for the role of the police or the prosecutors in their investigation.

For those who shared the majority opinion, the motives and the means of a police conspiracy to frame Simpson was too absurd to contemplate. The fact that so many black people did give that idea any credence was proof of their racial prejudice. The fact that a large minority of whites saw things the way the large majority of blacks did was proof to the majority of whites that celebrity status counted far more than color. It was proof that O.J.'s popularity could blind all weak-minded people to the obvious truth. Sure they believed in the legal presumption of innocence and were all for seeing that O.J. got a fair and impartial trial. But as soon as a "predominately black" jury was picked to hear the case, the media began to question that jury’s emotional and intellectual capability to render a just verdict on the evidence.

No matter what color you were you had only to agree with the minority to get a taste of "the black experience."

Thanks to Mark Fuhrman's role in the investigation, his taped remarks and the use to which O.J.'s defense team put that information, "the race card" was as familiar a part of the case as the bloody gloves and the Bruno Magli shoes. It meant that appeals to race were being used in place of appeals to reason. It's time to set the record straight.

O.J. Simpson killed no one. He was not a wife-beater and there was no evidence that he was either that couldn’t be traced to Mark Fuhrman and the movies he was most likely to have mimicked. When Fuhrman wrote in Murder in Brentwood about O.J. seeing his ex-wife’s murderer in a mirror, he could have been thinking of a white actor built like a halfback. He would have been an ideal symbol of the man whose words and image Fuhrman was soon to blacken and manipulate like a ventriloquist’s dummy. He was an actor playing an actor called Richard Mansfield in the 1988 Jack the Ripper movie. The part he played on stage was Jekyll and Hyde. While Det. Aberline was at the murder scene, his partner George Godley was searching Mansfield’s room without a warrant. The first thing Aberline did when Godley brought him in for questioning was to check his shoes. Mansfield was the innocent suspect who looked so much like O.J. Simpson when he took off his wig.

In Magic, Corky’s trunk contains a pair of boots with a distinctive tread pattern that can belonged only to his throat-slashing dummy Fats. Under the boots is a bloody wig. So, what do we have here, beginning with the killer in the mirror and the innocent dummy who looks so guilty? We have a wig (hair that comes off); hair that comes off (knit cap with hair in it); knit cap with hair in it; (large head) and a man with a large head in a knit cap with hair that came off of his head

Isn’t it interesting how the introduction of mirrors expands the range of observable possibilities? A mirror doesn’t really give you a duplicate image; it gives you the exact reverse. A right-handed man can now appear to be left-handed, right-handed or ambidextrous depending on how you choose to look at him. And if you expand the reversal idea as William Goldman did metaphorically in Magic you can have mirrors that transfrom the metaphorical world of symbols into the literal world of reality. They can turn good people into evil ones, innocent people into guilty ones and victims into perpetrators. Everything with an opposite can be that opposite, a choice between them or a combination of both. White can be black, black and white can be color, male can be female.

In actor/director Kenneth Branaugh’s Dead Again (1991), private detective Mike Church got the shock of his 1991 life when he looked into a mirror under hypnosis regression and saw a 1947 female murder victim named Margaret. In 1947 the innocent man accused of killing her was her husband, a famous entertainer named Roman Strauss. Roman had told Margaret that they were two halves of the same person. Roman looked like Mike, except that Roman had more hair. Mike lost that hair as he looked at himself in a mirror every day and occasionally shed his own blood with a sharp cutting instrument. Roman had a beard.

There’s almost no end to what you can do with mirrors and good