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Chapter 5

You may think that it’s hard to be a truly original writer but it isn’t. It’s impossible. Ideas grow out of other ideas which, in turn, have someone else’s ideas attached to them. Some you share and some are personal.

Your ears perk up when you hear your name. Your eyes take in more light when you see something or someone desirable. You pay extra attention when you see someone like yourself, someone who suffers what you fear, symbolizes what you hate or has what you wish you had.

Some of that is going to show up in your writing whether you chose to make it happen or not the way "monsters from the id" show up in your nightmares. Like Morbius in MGM’s 1956 hit movie Forbidden Planet, we can be no more than spectators to things that may come out of our subconscious minds when our creative engines are running around on automatic pilot.

Do you think, for instance, that all the similarities between Morbius and Altaira in Forbidden Planet, and Shakespeare’s Prospero and Miranda in The Tempest appeared by accident? Could the scene in The Naked Gun (1988) with Ted the LAPD lab guy showing Leslie Nielsen as Lt. Frank Drebin the Swiss Army shoe have borrowed nothing from the doctor in Forbidden Planet showing Leslie Nielsen as Commander J.J. Adams a plaster cast of the invisible monster’s foot? If not, what of the scene in The Naked Gun 2 ½ (1991) with the negative plaster mold of a man’s shoe and a dinosaur’s foot where a positive cast from wet plaster pured in a cavity should have been? If you didn’t get the joke originally, you should get it now. Just reverse what you see, like turning a girl into a boy or a comedy into a tragedy and you’ve got it. Or you could simply compare the pictures.

Keep in mind the mirror that Mark Fuhrman wrote about in his book and all the opposites a mirror can stand for in a dream. Think of Lincoln’s dream of seeing two images of himself in a mirror, one clear and one faint. Keep in mind the pennies he saw on his eyelids as a corpse in a dream that confirmed the worst prophetic interpretation of his dream about the mirror. Keep in mind the white supremacy obsession of John Wilkes Booth, his violent hatred of "niggers" and the future he thought he was making for "the white race" by killing Lincoln. Think of what Fuhrman’s image assassination of O.J. Simpson did for Booth’s cause.

Think of the coins Mark Fuhrman found in Nicole’s garage to supported his idea of a killer in a panic—one of which was a Lincoln penny. Think of the stories Fuhrman told his West Side bar buddies and his fellow Police Protective League picnickers of O.J.’s escalating violence toward Nicole that must have seemed to them on the 13^th of June 1994 like a fulfilled psychic prediction. Think of the different directions from which the stab wounds entered Ron Goldman’s body and the five stab wounds in his right cheek. Think of the fact that it was a silent kill in a small confined area where Fuhrman says Ron came to Nicole’s rescue. Think of the lost leather gloves and the hair in the lost cap that came out of O.J.’s head.

What Mark Fuhrman wrote in his notes and in his first book about why and how O.J. Simpson committed murder has too much in common with the actions and evidence he is personally tied to and movies containing similar actions and evidence to be coincidental. The connections don’t exist without his history, which includes being a motion picture fan, and the things he said and did in association with the case. The operative word is "association."

When I started looking for someone who could have framed O.J., it quickly became evident to me that if he existed, he had to have qualities most people associate with an obsessive-compulsive personality. The only person involved in the case that I knew about who fit that description was Mark Fuhrman. He also had the military background associated with silent double kills committed by one well-positioned man with two knives, and the mirrored blunt force injury above and to the rear of both victims’ ears. It struck me that only a man trained with a knife as a stunner as well as a slashing and stabbing weapon would think of using a knife in that way and have the presence of mind to do it. In the movie O.J. was making in which he slit someone’s throat, he was taught an entirely different silent kill technique.

Two reasons I made these connections are because I can be a tad obsessive-compulsive myself and I learned a thing or two about silent kills in the Army. As an engineer attached to an infantry company in Vietnam for the first half of 1971 I often took the last place in line on various combat missions. That left me vulnerable to the kind of attack suffered by Ron and Nicole. When I saw the computer animation of the killer in action Vietnam was the first thing I thought of. The second thing I thought of was Basic Training where the Army taught me various silent kill methods, including the use of a knife to stun and to kill. I said to myself, he moves like a soldier!

If the computer model was anywhere near accurate it meant that the killer had to think like a soldier. That meant he had to have practiced like one well in advance. It meant that most of the wounds to Ron and Nicole other than the ones a soldier would deliver as sure kills were put there to camouflage the nature of the assault, the killer’s real expertise and his state of mind.

Shortly after that eye-opening discovery, I learned that Mark Fuhrman had been a marine. He was, in fact, in training with the Marines the same year I was in combat with the Army. How could he not have known what I knew about silent kills…and how much sense does it make for the rage killing he attributed to O.J. to have been carried out in virtual silence?

If Fuhrman was the killer, we had something else in common that answered the question of why the killings took so long. It’s called a combat high. Trust me, there is nothing in common experience to compare with it. To give you some idea of what an ecstatic experience it is, consider what Chuck Yeager said when he was asked about his most exciting experience. He didn’t say it was breaking the sound barrier in the X-15. It was aerial combat fought to the death in WW II.

For some people a combat high can be as addictive as crack cocaine. The trouble is you have to expose yourself to life-treating challenges to achieve it, preferably another human being…or two…or more. When I realized to my horror that I could have become a combat junkie if my whole unit hadn’t been returned to the States six months into my tour, I saw a lot of things differently. I saw just how little separation there was between an ordinary man and a madman given the right genes to begin with and the right circumstances to put them in charge. I saw what it could do without a strong sense of moral obligation to keep it in check

Perhaps a similar insight moved Robert Lewis Stevenson to write The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Perhaps that’s why the writers of Forbidden Planet gave Morbius a murderous alter ego and why we were ready to believe on the strength of the shakiest evidence that O.J. had one, too. Perhaps that’s why it’s such an enduring dramatic theme. It touches a cord deep inside many of us…Some of us more than others.

Mark Fuhrman talked a lot about his love of danger. On the McKinney tapes he talked about thriving on situations where he might be badly outnumbered by "niggers." He talked about relying on his own resources to pull him through (like the tall, smart, , handsome blacksmith in Birth of a Nation who tracked Gus the renegade negro to a gin mill and beat up a dozen "black men" who seem to come out of nowhere before one of them shot him in the back). To eliminate any question about the role he later said he was "play acting" he said something else to underscore his love of danger. It was more than mere talk to impress his public. It was talk that could have landed him on death row if the wrong people picked up on the thread of associations it was attached to and gave it a good tug.

In the ’56 version of The Bad Seed, Monica Breedlove played by Evelyn Varden (The Night of the Hunter) is Christine (Nancy Kelly) Penmark’s, landlady. She has been psychoanalyzed extensively "from New York to Los Angeles." Monica’s analyst showed her that her "whole trouble was associating ideas with words and names. "My marriage to Fred Breedlove, for example. He said I married Fred because of the combination of ideas suggested by his name. The last syllable, love; romantic, eternal. And the first syllable…Umm. That is rather obvious, isn’t it."

Monica loves murder mysteries and has a highly successful crime writer as a guest. She says, "he thrives on buckets of blood and sudden death." Her tenant and friend, Christine Penmark, has an aversion to violence of any kind. To help her get at the root of her condition, Monica suggests that she listen to the writer’s account of an infamous serial killer—a practical nurse named Anderson who poisoned nine people—and "associate." Christine asks her what she means. She says, "Just speak up because any idea that comes into your mind will be an associated idea."

Anderson is associated with The Bad Seed and Forbidden Planet only by way of Mark Fuhrman’s 1989 poison pen letter to the Brentwood city attorney about O.J. and Nicole. Richard Anderson plays Chief Quinn, one of 19 "competitively selected, super perfect, physical specimens," aboard Leslie Nielsen’s spaceship. All of them are, coincidentally, white males. The evil self of Morbius literally steps out of a nightmare and murders Quinn. Quinn had a shipmate named Nichols and a superior officer named Farman played by Jack Kelly. Farman tangles with the monster when the juice from an electric barrier makes it visible and it kills two of his shipmates.

In the 1956 version of The Bad Seed, Rhoda Penmark takes her vitamins and tells her mother Christine, "I like the juice." Those are a hell of a lot of name associations, not counting Chris, as in Christopher Reeve, as in Superman. More about "Chris" later. For now, we want to concentrate on the concept of free association as a gateway to the subconscious mind.

Free association is, in fact, one of Freud’s proven techniques for delving into the subconscious mind, a strange landscape populated by fears and longings sometimes hidden behind masks of symbolism like some of the sexually suggestive scenes in The Naked Gun 2 ½. As far as Freud was concerned, nearly everything a human being said or did could be interpreted as sexually symbolic. Then again, as he said with a smile between draws on his trademark cigar, "sometimes a cigar is a cigar."

Free association is where the phrase "Freudian slip" comes from. It’s why Mark Fuhrman’s words and deeds associated with the Bundy Murders and the Juice, as he called O.J. in his book, are so revealing. The only reason we can link Mark Fuhrman to Mark Hamel’s Ted Bundy in The Deliberate Stranger, is because Fuhrman called the killing of Ron and Nicole "the Bundy murders" and made references to the crime that were a closer match to scenes from the movie than the crime scenes. And, of course, there’s the name Mark.

But let’s not forget Mrs. Breedlove’s problem of "associating ideas with words and names" and the words she extracted from the syllables of her husband Fred’s last name. Let’s forget Scotland Yard’s Fred Aberline for now. Let’s not forget Mark Fuhrman’s violently racist tirade in 1986 as his response to Kathleen Bell’s question about mixed couples being in love or the "rather obvious" racial consequences of their breeding. Let’s not forget that Mrs. Breedlove was talking to Christine Penmark, the mother of a little girl who beat a little boy bloody on a pier (O.J. in The Naked Gun) with the heel of her shoe over a penmanship medal she tho