An attempt by Jeanine Pirro, the hard-charging former district attorney of Westchester County, New York, to take renewed credit for the arrest of Robert Durst last March has provoked outrage from former colleagues and potential trial witnesses and prompted an acrimonious legal battle with the fired would-be ghostwriter of Pirro’s new book.

The just-published memoir, He Killed Them All, touts Pirro on the book jacket as the “true hero” of the 15-year effort to put Durst, the New York real estate heir turned multiple murder suspect, behind bars. Pirro says she hopes Durst, now in custody outside New Orleans awaiting an initial trial on gun charges, lives long enough to be tried and convicted of murder, after which “I want to dance in my Manolo Blahniks on his grave.”

However, some of Pirro’s closest collaborators are taking vigorous issue with her account, which offers no major new revelations and reads, in several places, as a blistering settling of scores with people who have previously questioned or challenged her. Her detractors, supported by some legal experts, say her confrontational attitude can only help Durst’s criminal defense team as they seek to exploit inconsistencies and differences among those most interested in seeing him prosecuted – for the 2000 murder of his friend Susan Berman in Los Angeles and, perhaps, for the 1982 disappearance of his first wife, Kathie.

“She’s putting potential witnesses in a bad spot if they have to testify in the LA case,” one former investigator on the Durst case said. He did not want to be named because he saw no mileage in getting “in the mud” with Pirro. The investigator has reviewed the Westchester County investigative files and shared them with the Guardian.

Durst has been indicted in the Berman case but is not expected to stand trial in Los Angeles until the New Orleans authorities have finished prosecuting him on gun charges. He is 72 years old and in poor health.

The lawsuit filed by the former ghostwriter, Lisa DePaulo, accuses Pirro of attempting to insert material into the book she knew to be untrue. The suit depicts Pirro as an overbearing, distracted boss who took advantage of DePaulo’s presence in her house to get her to do housework, help organize a wedding and oversee construction projects.

DePaulo moved into what she describes as the “maid’s quarters” in Pirro’s home in Rye, New York, in April and stayed until she was fired three days before her submission deadline in June. At one point, DePaulo alleges, Pirro handed her a bottle of Windex and instructed her to clean a pair of glass doors.

In an affidavit filed in response last Friday, Pirro described DePaulo’s quarters as a luxury guest wing, not a maid’s quarters; said her ghostwriter became “erratic and temperamental” and failed to meet deadlines; and accused her of smoking, drinking, and pill-popping on the job.

The affidavit did not, however, respond to DePaulo’s allegations about the proposed contents of the book. Pirro’s business manager and lawyers offered no other comment.

Robert Durst, 72, is currently awaiting trial in Louisiana and is in poor health. Photograph: Mike Segar/Reuters

Durst’s high-powered legal team has already sought to take advantage of Pirro’s high visibility – she hosts her own weekend show on Fox News – and her habit, going back years, of making personal appearances in courtrooms where Durst is on trial. She was woven into Durst’s defense when he stood trial in Texas in 2003 for shooting and dismembering his neighbour, a case that ended in acquittal. And she was called – but never appeared – as a witness in a pre-trial hearing in New Orleans earlier this year.

The controversy over Pirro’s book began many months before it was even published. Robert Durst’s brother Douglas – the head of the family real estate empire, the Durst Organization – sent a lawyer’s letter in July threatening to sue Pirro if she repeated certain past statements in the book. The lawyer who wrote that letter, Richard Emery, is now representing DePaulo and told the Guardian: “People are lining up who want to sue her.”

A spokesman for the Durst Organization, Jordan Barowitz, told the Guardian the book was “littered with defamatory insinuation” and accused Pirro of exploiting tragedy “for vanity and personal gain”.

Despite Pirro’s claims to have been central to the Durst case – she calls herself his “nemesis” – her own account does not point to any investigative breakthroughs made by her or her office. She describes two interviews she conducted personally – one with Debra Lee Charatan, whom Durst married in December 2000 as part of a strategy to hide from the law, and the other with Douglas Durst – but concedes that they yielded no incriminating information.

“If Debra Lee Charatan were a vault, she’d be Fort Knox,” Pirro writes. From Douglas Durst she writes that she got just “denials and claims of ignorance”.

DePaulo and at least one other investigator doubt the Charatan exchange took place as described in He Killed Them All – a sticking point likely to loom large in any future legal proceedings. DePaulo said in her lawsuit that when she interviewed Pirro in 2001, Pirro told her she had been held in a reception area until Charatan’s lawyer arrived and was then prevented from asking any questions because the lawyer invoked spousal privilege.

As reported in the Guardian earlier this year, several informed sources have contradicted Pirro’s claim – made in 2001 and again in The Jinx, the hit television documentary about Durst – that her office had been about to talk to Susan Berman when she was murdered because she was believed to know as much as anyone about Kathie Durst’s disappearance.

When invited to respond at the time, Pirro acknowledged having had an “appropriate professional skepticism” about an 18-year-old case with no body but did not otherwise address the allegation that she had misrepresented the sequence of events.

In the book, Pirro says again that her office considered Berman to be a key witness but she uses noticeably tentative language to characterize how close she was to sending someone to talk to Berman. “We put her on the board to be interviewed,” Pirro writes. “We put the wheels in motion to make this interview happen.”