On the evening of Saturday, July 4, 1998, the last night she was seen alive, Irene Silverman had invited two friends to dine with her at her spectacular, antique-filled Beaux Arts mansion on Manhattan’s East 65th Street. The 82-year-old Silverman, a flamboyant and extroverted woman who was the widow of the multimillionaire mortgage broker Sam Silverman, almost always had company. That night was no exception, even though most of her staff had the holiday weekend off. In her younger days, when she had homes in Paris, Athens, and Honolulu, as well as Manhattan, Silverman had been famous for her endless round of lively and eclectic parties, which mixed Rothschilds, writers, academics, and fashion designers with Greek Orthodox priests, English aristocrats, and her butcher or carpenter. In the last several years, however, Silverman had retreated into her $7 million town house, with its marble and its oak boiserie, its rooftop garden and its ballroom modeled on the music room of the Petit Trianon at Versailles.

Still, Silverman was usually surrounded by people. After the death of her husband in 1980, she had carved a few luxury apartments out of her house, and she began to take in tenants, people who could afford the average rent of $6,000 a month. Over the years they included business moguls, TV producers, the Marquess and Marchioness of Northampton, and luminaries such as Daniel Day-Lewis, Chaka Khan, the bandleader Peter Duchin, and the writer Michael Thomas. Her guests were treated to Silverman’s lavish hospitality. She entertained them with colorful storytelling and good food, and knew just about everything that was going on in their lives. “It was a sensational place to live,” Duchin recalls. “She really loved that house. She thought she was sharing it, even though she was charging you.”

On that Saturday evening, as Silverman was dining in her vast basement kitchen with her two friends Elva Shkreli, a young Albanian fashion designer, and Carol Hanssen, her biographer, she suddenly, according to an account in the British paper The Guardian, pointed to a closed-circuit monitor, one of several around the house. One of her tenants had just entered, and, as he’d done every day since moving in three weeks earlier, he averted his face from the camera in the foyer. By now Silverman had become deeply suspicious of this tenant. He had shown up on June 14, asking to rent an apartment. A handsome, well-dressed, articulate young man with a beautiful smile, he said he was a Palm Beach businessman by the name of Manny Guerrin. Silverman’s name had been given to him, he said, by an insurance broker in Florida and, friends of Silverman say, by Paul Vaccari, the son of Silverman’s longtime butcher, Rudy. The young man had no references and no ID, but he promised that he would get those to her the next day. Silverman, who friends say checked her tenants’ references thoroughly, had hesitated, but Guerrin pulled out $6,000 in cash. She showed him to Apartment 1B, which was near the apartment that Silverman used as her office and occasionally as her bedroom. Duchin, for one, surmises that the cash could have been the lure. The daughter of a seamstress, Silverman had been raised in poverty and had worked hard for a living—in Radio City Music Hall’s corps de ballet—before she married into wealth.

Guerrin did not produce his references the next day. According to law-enforcement officials, he also refused to allow Silverman’s maids to enter his apartment. He had strange visitors, a young man and an older woman, who, like him, averted their faces from the security camera at the entryway. Appalled that she had allowed him into her home, Silverman asked Guerrin to leave a week after he arrived. When he did not leave, she cut off the phone service to 1B and instructed her business manager, Jeff Feig, to begin eviction proceedings. She did not, however, call the police, a source says. She was a confident woman, “tough as nails,” says her friend Ronald Grele, director of Columbia University’s Oral History Research Office. “She was determined to get him out—there was no doubt about that,” says James Shenton, a professor emeritus of history, also at Columbia, who was a friend of Silverman’s for 25 years. “But she was equally determined not to refund the $6,000. She was certainly not going to be cheated. She also did not expect to be murdered.”