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Chapter 6

The Bundy/Rockingham jigsaw puzzle contains more than a few pieces here and there from stories we’ve seen and heard before. The pieces Mark Fuhrman brings to the table invariably come in groups, each group making a complete picture of its own. Take for example Fuhrman's account of the murders with the beautiful blond (1) on the phone (2) preparing to order a take-out meal. She spots her tall, black, athletic, pigeon-toed mate from a former life in the alley behind her garage dressed very oddly (3) and goes to the kitchen (4) to arm herself with a butcher knife (5) in case he gets into the house. The phone, by the way, is a subtle reminder of Nicole’s calls to 911.

Fuhrman had no comment on why she didn’t call 911 or why she put the knife down before going to the front of the house and stepping outside to confront her ex. He did not say why she put it down on her kitchen counter with the tip of the blade pointed outward. The knife in Lange and Vannatter’s O.J. book looks exactly like the one Virginia Madsen, as Helen in Candyman, picked up to protect herself from the obsessed, stalker, slasher, title character armed with his own deadly weapon.

It might seem like a stretch to say that the dark brown actor’s missing hand could be symbolic of O.J.’s missing dark brown leather glove and the hook was symbolic of his knife. It would be a stretch if it were not for three things related to the Bundy murders:

What Candyman did to Helen with his hook….

Where an insanely jealous man in the 1987 comedy Adventures in Babysitting said he put his severed hand…

He told Chris, played by Elizabeth Shue and her young charges, one of whom was played by an actor named Keith that he kept it in the glove compartment of his truck. John Ford Noonan plays John Purit who has two rounded metal hooks in place of the lost hand. His truck bears his initials JP. Rick Goldman plays the man he attempts to kill after seeing him in a picture window with his wife. O.J. seeing Nicole in a picture window with Ron Goldman’s boss Keith Zlomsowitch was supposed to have lit the fuse that set off "O.J. the stalker" a year and a half later when he saw Nicole with Goldman. Zlomsowitch never testified under oath

What a lone cop in 1992’s Jennifer 8 found in a garbage dump…

While many cops search for a missing knife that was used to slice a man’s throat two or three times before making the fatal cut, a cop in another part of the crime scene believes that he might have found a severed human hand in a plastic bag. Former LA Detective John Berlin (German capital, rhymes with Fuhrman), shines his flashlight on the object and sees that it is, indeed, a severed human hand. It is moist and sticky from discarded pasta (as in Italian food) and rainwater (Fuhrman shined his flashlight on the right-hand glove he found with a plastic bag nearby and described it as being moist and sticky). Both of Nicole’s hands were found palm up, as was the left-hand glove that Fuhrman asked the police photographer to photograph him pointing his finger at. His theory of Nicole on the phone with a takeout food menu in her hand when she spotted O.J. comes from his discovery of a pizza menu under her body.

Two dogs are involved in the garbage dump double homicide. Ditto Bundy. A bra is found with type AB- blood on it. Nicole’s blood type was AB+. The hand with many small scars belonged to a woman who had been decapitated. Nicole’s hands had many small cuts. She had been nearly decapitated. The coroner arrived at the dump late (ditto Bundy). No one found the murder weapon because Berlin and his partner convinced everyone up front that an innocent person had it and would lie about it. The police and the press focussed all of their attention on him.

The killer was the first lead detective on the case, a very smart man with a Jekyll and Hyde personality. He got involve long before the bodies were discovered. He had enough in common with the man he set out to frame that he had no fear of those things incriminating him if he pointed the finger of guilt at the other man first. As a homicide detective he knew what homicide detectives look for and he gave it to them in spades.

Could a detective on Bundy (whose name rhymes with Berlin) have had the knife and convinced everyone the wrong person had it? Could the small woman’s hand have doubled as a symbol for a bloody, men’s extra large, leather glove?

Berlin is the only person in the movie who was filmed pointing to the murdered woman’s hand. Fuhrman was the only person on Bundy who was photographed pointing to the murder’s glove—the one he said Goldman pulled off of the killer’s hand. That left-hand glove, as it lies palm-up near the fence on Bundy, says nothing about the murderer’s identity. But it merges two images from separate realms of time and space to become a potent symbol for the right-hand glove near the fence on O.J.’s property when you learn that Fuhrman pointed it out to Lange and Vannatter. That clearly establishes the significance of symbolism with Fuhrman and the gloves—mirror images of each other that call to mind the big hands O.J. was rumored to have beaten Nicole with repeatedly until he killed her.

One more thing about the hand in the movie and the gloves in real life: A severed hand can be expected to have had blood on it at the point of separation from the wrist. That’s where O.J.’s blood from his left hand was found on the right-hand glove…in the notch by the palm.

If that’s not enough symbolism for you, think of all the things that a hand could stand for and how they apply to Fuhrman in the Bundy case:

For the first hour of the investigation, the fate of the case was in Fuhrman’s hands.

When Vannatter and Lange took over, Fuhrman and Roberts stayed on to give them a hand.

Fuhrman and Roberts had a hand in every significant piece of evidence than anyone developed.

The center of Fuhrman’s hand where he was photographed between Nicole’s head and Goldman’s feet marks the center of an 8" radius containing five key pieces of evidence, including the glove.

If Fuhrman was angling for a big hand from the American public with his star performance in the trial of the century, he got it.

The list goes on and on. That’s what makes dreams so hard to interpret. Without knowing everything a word, a phrase, a name or an object might stand for in the context of an individual’s life, you can’t be sure of what it might stand for in his dreams. A hand could be a hand. It could be something else, but the pattern, no matter how chaotic it may appear to be at first, follows its own internal logic. Sometimes it takes more than what is visible for everything that was there all along to click into place.

The first turning point in Jennifer 8 came with Berlin clicking his lighter and waiting outside for his partner inside a garage to finish his work. It had to have struck a cord with Fuhrman if he saw it after the Bundy killings. It had to have been an inspiration to him if he studied it beforehand. The garage scene is where Berlin matched the red stop signal shaped like a hand to the clicking noise that accompanied it to tell blind people when to stop for traffic. From there, he went on to solve the crime.

Just because Fuhrman could have gotten ideas for planting evidence and ideas from Jennifer 8, doesn’t mean he did, anymore than he had to have gotten other ideas from Jack the Ripper, Street Smart or The Bad Seed. But if you watch enough movies you know that somebody got some of those ideas from movies and injected them in whole or part into the crime scenes and the investigation of O.J. Simpson. We know that because those particular things were out of O.J.’s zone of interests or control and they could not have materialized when and where they did by chance. The closer you get to Fuhrman’s zone of interests and control in his best-known case the more specific the movie links to him become.

Nicole’s bloodied dog led a neighbor to the murder scene at Bundy. Ron Goldman had several non-fatal cuts in his throat that the coroner characterized as "taunting" wounds. In Jennifer 8, the man in the dump had similar wounds. Berlin’s prompt, expert and certain identification of the killer made a real investigation impossible by anyone else. Fuhrman made all of the crucial discoveries in the Bundy case. He started much earlier than 1994 and the female victim’s bra with the AB blood type in Jennifer 8 is a good place to start rolling the time tape backward.

Before O.J. and Nicole devorced in ’92 Fuhrman established himself as "Nicole’s cop" with scores of police officers in various social settings. He talks about his "up close and personal" knowledge of her "boob job" coupled with tales of O.J. treating her like a punching bag and her deathly fear of him. All of that dovetailed nicely into the ’89 New Years day incident where Nicole ran into officer John Edwards’ arms crying, "He’s going to kill me!" It had been raining. Her pants were dirty from where she fell in the mud. All she had on top was a bra. She told Edwards that O.J. kept a lot of guns and she feared he would shoot her.

It took Fuhrman to put a deadly weapon in O.J.’s hands with his tale of coming to Rockingham in ’85 in his black and white squad car and seeing Nicole, O.J. and a Mercedes-Benz in circumstances that left "an indelible impression" in his memory. He said that Nicole was sobbing and hinted that she was as terrified of O.J. as Kathy Baker’s character in Street Smart was of Fast Black when he threatened to blind her in one eye (the murdered woman in Jennifer 8 was partially blind). In Fuhrman’s report, the German car with the German woman’s name sounded like a symbolic representation of the woman born in Germany that O.J. identified as his wife the way Fast Black identified his whores.

The accent on "his" comes mostly from the words Fuhrman ascribed to O.J. speaking for a sobbing Nicole with a baseball bat in is hand. The rest comes from the accent Fuhrman put on those words to make it sound as though O.J. regarded his beautiful new bride as no less his property to do with as he pleased than his beautiful German car with the broken glass. Lance Henriksen with a baseball bat in his hand as Freddy Ross in Jennifer 8 could rekindle thoughts of what O.J. might have done with the bat. It might also bring to mind the fact that a baseball bat is sometimes called a stick and in the course of playing the game the bat sometimes splinters

In that sense, the bat Fuhrman said he saw in O.J.’s hands and the freshly splinter piece of wood that Fuhrman said O.J. snagged under his Bronco are like the glove he pointed to on Bundy and the one he found on Rockingham. The two objects from separate times and places come together in the mind with little or no conscious thought the way images from Nicole’s "battered face" in ’89 came together with the sound of her frightened voice in ’93. None of that could have happened without Mark Fuhrman’s 1989letter to the Brentwood city attorney.

The power in that letter has less to do with his heavy-handed use of incriminating "quotes" than his repetition of memorable themes and his subtle way of suggesting things he wants you to believe without actually saying them. He’s got that trick down cold and uses it with great effect.

If you heard Fuhrman’s trial testimony, for example, you might swear that you heard him say he left the Police Protective League Picnic on the 12^th of June shortly before 8:00 P.M. If you read his book, you’d swear he wrote that O.J. showed up at Nicole’s shortly after 10:00. He actually said he left the picnic "before" 8:00—which could have been 24 hours before 8:00 without a polygraph needle getting ugly about it. He hypothesized that Nicole spotted O.J. in the alleye in the back of John Edwards’ mind when he saw the bloodless "cut" between Nicole’s nose and lip? For what other reason would he recall seeing a cut where the scratch was as well as a black eye where there wasn’t one. What impact do you think Street Smart would have had on Mark Fuhrman, particularly when it stared a tall black man with the same unfortunate initials has his? Is it really that hard to think that he, after reading Edwards’ report, might have gotten his "indelible impression" of the 1985 incident that he put his 1989 report from the 1987 movie?

This we know: Fuhrman got a lot of the ideas he put to practical use from movies. When he gave the city attorney his "Fast Black and Punchy" interpretation of O.J. and Nicole they accepted it without question. All of Nicole's 911 calls began, after Fuhrman's first unsummoned visit to Rockingham. There is no evidence that O.J. harmed her in any way before 1989, when Fuhrman filed his O.J.-the-controller-pimp report, and no evidence that she called 911 in ’85 or ’89.

If the National Enquirer couldn't make a story out of either incident involving O.J., Nicole, Fuhrman and the two unauthenticated 911 calls attributed to Nicole, it is hard to see how anyone could. No one did until the morning of June 13, 1994 when Fuhrman and his junior partner Brad Roberts got involved in the case. That person was, in the words of celebrated author and O.J. criminal trial reporter Dominick Dunn, the senior partner, "one of the great detectives of our time," Mark Fuhrman.