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"Every program snippet in the opening credits of Hunter for the ’84-’85 season came from the pilot. Dee Dee McCall pointing her revolver toward the camera is from the sequence where King Hays is holding a knife to a prostitute’s throat. If you saw the pilot you can “see” the man she’s aiming at in every show that season. You can see the events leading up to it where the black man grabs the white woman by the throat and slaps her to the ground. You can hear McCall tell the arrogant pimp, “You like to hit women, don’t you King?” before he grabs the cringing Asian girl named Gretchen by her hair, whips out his knife and says, “That’s not all I like to do to them.”
That scene has a banged up car, a shattered windshield and other details in Fuhrman’s 1989 letter to the city attorney about his “1985” Rockingham encounter with O.J. and Nicole. All you have to do now is make a composite of the women, call that character “Nicole,” turn a Cadillac into a Mercedes, pull a baseball bat from another part of the Hunter pilot and put it where it fits in Fuhrman’s letter.
Fuhrman’s letter was written in response to the ’89 incident in which Nicole ran to a police officer crying, “He’s going to kill me!” That part of the incident comes from a 1987 episode of Hunter. The fact that someone slashed Nicole’s throat with a knife in ’94 and the evidence pointed to O.J. as the killer broadens the scope of the King Hays scene to include the man who slit the throats of blue-eyed blondes. Now all you have to do to get O.J. as the man with the knife is to make a composite character out of Dr. Bolin and King Hays. You need only Hunter and Bolin to get Fuhrman. Nicole had brown eyes. With Gretchen in a composite character with Bolin’s victims you have the brown eyes, too.
All of the above have one common denominator – Mark Fuhrman.
I didn’t see the Hunter pilot until 2004 so I didn’t know where the ten-second sequences in the opening credits came from. I didn’t know that Rick Hunter got his breaking and entering skills from Dee Dee McCall and I knew nothing of Capt. Cain, the killer’s Bronco or Brian Dennehy’s role as the killer. I didn’t know Dennehy’s birthday was the same as O.J.’s or that so much of Fuhrman’s account of his encounters with O.J. and Nicole were in the Hunter pilot.
I wasn’t surprised to learn that Fuhrman had a special interest in Hunter. Of all the cop shows produced in the ’70s and ’80s, that one had more in common with Fuhrman’s self-portrait than any other. Rick Hunter’s defining characteristics carried over from show to show and the precinct captain who took Cain’s place shared Cain’s opinion of Hunter. Hunter’s attitude toward him was the same as his attitude toward Cain. Whenever possible Hunter ignored everyone in his higher chain of command.
I avoided Hunter mainly because I didn’t think Fred Dryer had the acting credentials to play the title character in a TV series. 17 episodes into the first season I heard so many good things about the show from the people I worked with that I tuned in to see for myself. I saw “The Avenging Angel” with Robert Gray as an electronic surveillance expert named Arnold Morton and John Amos as Capt. Dolan. I was impressed.
“The Avenging Angel” begins with brief highlight from that episode and goes into the standard sequences from the pilot with the “The Avenging Angel” credits superimposed on them. You hear the soundtrack from “Every Breath You Take,” the stalker song by the rock group Police. You see Morton taking and developing photos of Rick Hunter doing everything from walking down the street to hoisting a man by his collar. If you saw the Hunter pilot you recognize the hoisted man as Whispering Willie, the Puerto Rican pimp. You see a library of numbered Hunter videocassettes, a reel-to-reel tape recorder and Morton loading a microphone into the handle of a cane.
You didn’t have to see previous episodes of Hunter to get a good rendering of the title character. Nancy Stafford who appears in Matlock a year later as defense attorney Michelle Thomas, is defense attorney Nell Armstrong in “The Avenging Angel”. She has Rick Hunter on the witness stand where she is taking him apart. Her client, a dentist named Pierpoint who attempted to kill his wife, has his arm in a sling and Nell questions Hunter about reading him his rights twice. She suggests that the first time he did it her client was unconscious because Hunter threw him through a plate glass window and down two flights of stairs. He can explain it but he can’t deny it.
Unlike other pro football players-turned actors like Fred “The Hammer” Williamson, Jim Brown and the young O.J. Simpson, Fred Dryer was a good actor from jump. The life he breathed into Rick Hunter made the character believable and made the show fun to watch – in small doses.
Arnold Morton sits in the back row of the courtroom listening to Hunter’s testimony. When Hunter sits down behind the prosecution table, Morton adjusts the microphone in his cane to pick up whispers between Hunter and McCall. He hears Hunter complain about Nell Armstrong’s tactics. His displeasure with the attorney reflects Hunter’s.
Next up is Robert Pastorelli as William Wakefield. He is the “cool guy” in the cowboy boots who hits on Helen Mirren as Betty in “Dead Woman’s Shoes” and the killer cop in Striking Distance. In “The Avenging Angel” he’s a key prosecution witness who changes his testimony in court to undermine the case against Pierpoint.
Hunter knows that Pierpoint has paid Wakefield to change his testimony and expresses his outrage to McCall inside and outside of the courthouse. He says that he wished the people involved in this miscarriage of justice would get run over by a bus. Morton, picking up Hunter’s every word, takes him literally and begins killing the “bad guys,” starting with Wakefield. He runs the man over with a Pinto and calls Hunter to apologize for not being able to do it with a bus.
In Detour to Terror (’79) O.J. Simpson is a bus driver who kills three bad guys with his bus. In The Naked Gun 2 ½ O.J. is the electronic surveillance expert who gets trapped under a bus bound for Detroit. Robert Gray, the surveillance expert in “The Avenging Angel”, is a native Detroiter. The obsessed stalker theme and the lyrics of “Every Breath You Take” are key components in Fuhrman’s claim that O.J. killed Nicole and Ron. Fuhrman’s “old friend” Ron Shipp was in a business where the kind of equipment Morton uses to spy on Hunter is easily available. To commit the Bundy murders and frame O.J., the killer needed someone to keep an eye and ear on O.J. before, during and after the murders. “The Avenging Angel” shows how easily it could be done.
After Wakefield’s murder, Hunter and McCall conduct an illegal search of his house and discover evidence that Dr. Pierpoint did pay him to change his testimony. Hunter also finds something odd about a message left on Wakefield’s phone answering machine and realizes that the man calling himself Hunter’s “avenging angel” is the man who left an anonymous tip about the killer dentist. He and McCall rush to warn Dr. Pierpoint but they are too late. Morton has booby-trapped the telephone in his office. When he picks up the receiver the office explodes.
An electronic technology expert named Yeager in Hunter’s West LA precinct, who also appears to be a psychologist, analyzes the tape that Hunter thought was suspicious. He finds that someone has altered it by taking words out of sequence and splicing them together. The altered message leads Wakefield to the right place at the right time to get hit by the speeding car. Yeager writes a report that says the bomber admires Hunter. He says that the killer is like a kid seeking his father’s approval. “He is walking in what he believes are Hunter’s footsteps.” Hunter says he’s a “nut case.” Parked outside of the police station in his covert surveillance van, Morton hears everything.
Hunter and McCall now have enough information to be confident that the killer is an electronics surveillance expert. They believe that he overheard Pierpoint plotting to kill his wife while working on a case for a government agency. John Amos makes his first appearance as Capt. Dolan in “The Avenging Angel” with Yeager’s psychological profile of the killer in his hand. He uses it to express how he feels about Hunter. He says, “Couldn’t he have chosen a more well rounded image like maybe Idi Amine or Gangues Kan?”
Dolan is not about to contact every government agency for a list of electronic surveillance experts that correspond to the anonymous tipster although, as Hunter says, “One of these guys is a homicidal maniac.” Dolan doesn’t say what he thinks the detectives should do to stop the killer but he has strong feelings about why he exists. He tells Hunter, “You now why we got a mad bomber, Hunter? I’ll tell you why we got a mad bomber. It’s because every time the system lets you down you want to cut corners. You want to break procedures and then you want to go on a corner and moan and groan and demand divine intervention. As far as I’m concerned, this Avenging Angel got all his bright ideas from you.”
Of course he did. There wouldn’t be a story if he didn’t. Is Hunter upset that this killer used him as a template for committing murder in the name of justice? Of course he isn’t. The man is a psycho. Hunter is a dedicated police officer. His job now is to catch this guy – by hook or crook.
Where did Fuhrman get his ideas about his “Dirty Harry meets Attila the Hun” character? Why did he tell Laura Hart that he threw a suspect down a flight of stairs? Where did he get all of his bright ideas about O.J. Simpson? Why do so many of them show up again in Murder in Greenwich as his ideas about Michael Skakel? Could the one-eye in the scene showing a mob of reporters on the Moxley lawn have anything to do with the one-eyed pimp King Hays in the Hunter pilot? If not, what is the man with the camera to his eye doing in an aviator jacket? Yes, there are many other one-eyed characters in different movies linked to that scene including John Glover’s character Ramey in 52 Pick-up. But why do all of them fit within 6-minutes of one Murder in Greenwich scene?
When you put all of the one-eyed characters into composites of people linked to Fuhrman by way of what he told Kathleen Bell and Laura Hart about his attitudes and exploits what do you get? You get Nastassja Kinski, Kim Novak, May Britt, Grace Zabranski, Sherilyn Fenn and Kathy Baker – white women linked to black men in their private lives or in screenplays. You get French connections, moonlight, Greek Mythology, an Oakland Raider and murder/frame-up conspiracies. You get royalty and you get pimps. Fuhrman didn’t get all of his bright ideas from Hunter but it looks as though it’s where he got the idea that he could turn fiction into reality by setting up O.J. Simpson for a great fall.
The more I saw of Hunter and McCall’s attitude toward law enforcement in opinion polls, political campaigns and conversations around the coffee pot at work, the less entertaining the show became. I saw a definite split between the way most black people I knew saw shows like this and the way most white people I knew saw them.
The “black” perspective, which a large minority of white people shared, had nothing to do with their attitude toward cops in the real world. Of course there was excessive violence. It was an action show, the more violence the better. Of course the good guys violated proper police procedure and the Constitutional rights of their suspects. Watching cops adhere to proper police procedure and safeguard the rights of the accused in a complex murder case is boring and unrealistic. Besides, everyone knew that the suspects were guilty because we saw them commit the crimes. Everyone knew that Hunter and McCall were on the front lines of life and death decisions that had to be made quickly. They might have bent a few rules but they served justice and gave us an entertaining ride.
The majority “white” perspective on shows like Hunter, which a small minority of blacks shared, had everything to do with their attitude toward law enforcement in the real world. The people who saw things this way didn’t talk about the rights of the accused. They talked about the rights of the criminals as though suspect was another name for criminal. When a criminal suspect was set free because police obtained evidence against him illegally, they were angry at the “liberal” judges and “unscrupulous” attorneys who freed them on “technicalities.”
Without Hunter and McCall doing what they did to get the goods on Dr. Bolin with the cowboy hat and boots they found in his bedroom, the murders would have continued and justice would not have been served. They did what most Americans wanted all good detectives to do. In opinion polls taken in the 1980s and early ’90s a majority of Americans would have tossed away the Bill of Rights when they were presented to them as “legal technicalities.” Hunter, therefore, had a large, built-in audience of sympathetic viewers. So did Mark Fuhrman. In opinion poles conducted before the McKinny tapes became public a majority of white Americans viewed Fuhrman’s act of going over the wall to let in the other detectives as “daring.”
The first time I watched the Hunter pilot I looked for big things like the killer’s clothes and murder weapon, a blue knit cap, an aviator jacket, a blue jean jackets, a French connection, a name link or a birthday link. I looked for cowboy boots, Nikes, bears, Lincolns, lit candles, milk, crucifixes, covert surveillance, ex-marines, doctors, psychics, taxicabs, busses, trains, and SUVs. I looked for O.J.-like qualities in the villain and Fuhrman-like qualities in the villain and the hero. I looked for Fuhrman neckties, royalty, time manipulation and false identification.
With so many connections to choose from you’d think that you could find them in any movie if you look hard enough. You can’t. The reason you can’t is because they don’t stand on their own. Where you find lit candles you also have to find music, a crucifix an envelope, a bathtub, framed pictures of the accused, a murderer or a murder victim. A blue knit cap has to link to a murder scene, a black man, a dock, a sweat suit, leather gloves, shoeprints or a blue jean jacket. A Fuhrman necktie is only a necktie unless a cop, a killer or an authority figure is wearing it.
I’ve checked out movies where the stars and the synopses led me to expect many links to Fuhrman and I saw none. The one-eye link in the Hunter pilot, for instance, is only a link because the pimp’s name is King (Fuhrman’s run-in with Capt. York over Martin Luther King’s birthday). What he does to McCall makes it a strong link because his fingers are on her neck and when he slaps her she falls on her side in a similar position that Nicole’s body was found in. McCall’s short black skirt and black and blue top are all black in the back where the camera points when Stephanie Kramer’s stunt double hits the pavement. What King Hays does to Gretchen makes it a stronger link because she is cringing in fear when he grabs her, she has brown eyes and a German name.
This sort of thing is the big stuff in the Hunter pilot that you don’t have to look for to see. Fuhrman’s attention to details requires a look at small things like the elbow patches on a man named Justin Taylor. You see him coming up in an elevator and entering Dr. Bolin’s office as Hunter and McCall take the elevator down. The next time you see him, you think he’s Bolin because he is wearing Bolin’s cowboy outfit and sneaking into McCall’s apartment with a knife.
McCall chases the man down, shoots him with her service revolver (six-iron) and he falls dead in a fountain in the courtyard of her apartment complex. Hunter turns the body over saying, “Party’s over Bolin.” The detectives are surprised to see that the dead man in the water isn’t who they think he is. McCall says, “looks like the doctor doesn’t make house calls. Who’s this guy?” He looks familiar to McCall but she can’t place where she saw him before until she gets a report that tells her he has a long history of assorted mental disorders and he was Dr. Bolin’s patient. Now she knows why he looks familiar. Now I knew from converging scenes in A Touch of Scandal, Frenzy, Taking the Heat, Robocop, The Resurrected and Murder in Greenwich why he looked familiar to me.
If you recall the scene in Murder in Greenwich where Fuhrman and Weeks are questioning Rob Mathers in his office somewhere in a high-rise building you know why Taylor’s light brown jacket with the dark brown elbow patches look familiar. You saw the young Rob Mathers wearing the jacket in his account of being questioned by Greenwich police detectives the day Martha Moxley’s body was discovered. He tells Fuhrman and Weeks that he met Martha only once “at a party.” He also tells them that he saw Tommy Skakel without an attorney at the police station. In the Mathers flashback you see Tommy coming the other way wearing his cowboy jacket and being escorted by a detective as Mathers, escorted by two detectives, passes him on the way up.
After Fuhrman and Weeks interview Mathers you see a flashback Tommy Skakel approaching the window of his father’s Lincoln. Tommy is wearing his cowboy hat and his cowboy jacket and singing a country-western song. He gives Martha a driving lesson around a fountain. In Hunter Justin wears another man’s shoes. In “Dead Man’s Shoes” Warren Stevens as Nathan Bledso becomes a different man. Gangsters in a Lincoln dump a body in the ally where he, in his jacket with elbow patches, puts on the dead man’s shoes. On his way up to the murder victim’s apartment with the dead man’s ghost in control of his body he passes a couple coming the other way.
Steve Weeks think Tommy killed Martha. Fuhrman doesn’t. Dr. Baden gives them a time range for Martha’s death, which breaks Michael’s alibi. Hildy gives Fuhrman “Michael’s” obsession/rejection motive. The Maryland Man gives him “Michael’s confession.” Fuhrman’s meeting with the Maryland Man leads to his epiphany about Martha and Tommy being in the Skakel house when Michael got home. You see Martha in flashbacks waiting for Tommy in a bed with a Teddy Bear pillow.
McCall sleeps with a Teddy Bear named Tom. You see this soft side of the Brass Cupcake after Hunter breaks into her apartment to save her from Dr. Terry Bolin. When I saw the one-eyed man, I expected to see a bear somewhere in the movie (Everett McGill in Silver Bullet. O.J. in The Naked Gun stepping in a bear trap after several men, including one with a patch over his eye shoot him). I wasn’t surprised to see the fountain, either (O.J. falling into the bay with the bear trap on his ankle).
Kathleen Bell was embarrassed to admit on the witness stand that she asked Fuhrman for his birthday to find out if his astrological sign was compatible with her friend Andrea Terry’s astrological sigh. Mark Fuhrman is an Aquarius. Aquarius, the water bearer, is a water sign that includes Fuhrman’s birthday, February 5, and St. Valentine’s Day, February 14. The fountain in McCall’s courtyard where Hunter turns over the body of Justin Taylor in Dr. Bolin’s cowboy outfit features a water bearer with a perpetually leaky pitcher. Taylor loses his hat when McCall’s bullet slams into his body. You don’t see the blood mixed with water in the basin soaking into Taylor’s leather gloves but you know that it has to be there.
I didn’t need the fountain to get the blood and water mix along with key elements from the Bundy murder scene, Fuhrman’s notes, and photos. I saw them in Innocent Blood, The Ninth Configuration and Death Becomes Her. I keyed on blood and water mixtures from the water stains on the “Mothers” poem in Murder in Brentwood and Fuhrman’s note about the heel print below the bloody glove. I noted the shape of the blood pooled half in and half out of the heel print. I thought it had mostly to do with Laura Hart until I realized that the red “heart” was a valentine and Valentines Day falls under Fuhrman’s astrological sign. I then realized that I didn’t even need the water stains on the poem for the blood and water link. The bloody “Aquarius” valentine was enough.
The half of the valentine inside of the heel print looked like the cleat on the heel of 8-year-old Rhoda Penmark’s shoe in The Bad Seed. As a prank, Leroy the handyman sprays her shoes with water from his garden hose before she leaves for a school picnic where a boy drowns at the edge of a pier. The boy’s body is found with peculiar marks on his hands and his forehead. As a prank, Leroy tells Rhoda that he believes she killed the boy with her shoe and the marks on his body came from the cleat on the heel of her shoe. He says that he has the shoes and that the police can find the boy’s blood on them no matter how thoroughly she washed them. Rhoda kills Leroy in earnest.
Rhoda is a piano player. Her favorite tune has a French title she translates into English for her father as “By the Light of the Moon.” She burns Leroy alive and plays her favorite tune on the piano as he screams in agony. She then sets out to kill a woman who gave her a heart-shaped locket with her birthstone inside. Rhoda’s first kill was a woman who promised her a crystal ball paperweight with fish suspended in plastic when she died. When her mother learns what Rhoda did and how she thinks, she tries to kill her and herself. She fails at both, but not before Rhoda learns what she did with the medal that Rhoda stole from the boy. Rhoda sneaks out of her house at night and walks fearlessly in the rain amid claps of thunder and bursts of lighting to retrieve it.
Murder in Greenwich has rainwater and water in other forms throughout.
You see every form of water in Angel Heart because Harry Angel’s birthday is St. Valentine’s Day (Aquarius) and Margaret Krusemark is an astrologer. You see snow when Angel shoots Dr. Fowler and ice when he kill’s Margaret’s father. You see steam rising from manhole covers. You see a close-up of a black boy’s shoes as he tap dances on a rain soaked street after Angel cuts out Margaret’s heart. You don’t see the cleats on the boy’s heels but you hear them. Angel visited Margaret on the pretext of having her prepare his horoscope. He gave her Johnnie Favorite’s February 14th birthday not knowing that it is his birthday.
Charlotte Rampling is Margaret. Like Fuhrman, her birthday and Jennifer Jason Leigh’s birthday is February 5. Leigh’s dad Vic Morrow was born on Valentines Day. Leigh took her middle name from Jason Robards. He is Al Capone in The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre.
I tried to use my July 26 birthday as an arbitrary statistical control in interpreting the meaning of birthdays in the Fuhrman movie collection. I had to use other birthdays instead because Jason Robards, Helen Merrin, Mick Jagger and Dean Jagger’s birthday being July 26 took the random element out of July 26. Merrin as Georgina in The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover performs fillatio in a restaurant on a character named Michael. Mick Jagger, the Devil in “American Pie” wrote “Cocksucker Blues” and “Sympathy for the Devil”. Dean Jagger is a powerful figure in Brotherhood of the Bell. He died on February 5. The CIA was born on July 26. Lorenzo Lamas stars with O.J. as a hijacker O.J. kills in Detour to Terror and as CIA agent Mark Graver in C.I.A.: Code Name Alexa.
Kurt Kreuger, a gigolo and a murder victim in The Dark Corner is one of the mobsters gunned down in The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. He was born in Germany on July 26. He’s the Nazi pilot in Columbia’s 1943 classic Sahara who calls the Sudanese soldier, “nigger.” In Sahara, water is a lifesaver, a weapon, a torture device, a tool of deception and a potent motivating force.
In Murder in Greenwich, water in some form is the backdrop for Fuhrman’s meetings with the people most influential in his theory of when, why and how Martha Moxley died. He stirred Hildy Southerlyn’s conscience in the rainy croquet scene. From his meeting with Rob Mathers in a building overlooking a riverfront he narrowed his list of murder suspects to the Skakel house. He met Michael Badin at the train station with steam rising up around them. He discussed Baden’s autopsy findings at an outside café by a bay and said goodbye to him at the steamy train station with an extended timeline that put Michael Skakel on his suspect list. The Maryland Man is a special rainy scene case.
Enter Tanya Peters from The Naked Gun 33 1/3, Fred Clawson from The Dark Half, Emil Antonowski from Robocop, Maryann Graver from Bird on a Wire and some of the brightest stars of the ’90s from Flatliners…."
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