When Harold acquired the home in the 1950s, it was described as a “delightful 12-room home, with terraced lawns, artistic gardens and a magnificent view.” A spacious tiled entrance hall and stairway led to a charming living room, a glass conservatory, dining room, den, breakfast room and kitchen. Upstairs, the second floor had four master bedrooms and three baths, while the third floor boasted a bar and a ballroom. There were staff quarters too, though the Perelsons’ only “help” was a teenaged babysitter who was also a neighbor.

Cheri Lewis was 14 and had grown up in the shadow of the Perelsons’ house, in the cottage directly opposite 2475 Glendower Place. She and I meet in June, at her busy dental practice in Beverly Hills. She is spritely, with bright eyes, and speaks to me in hushed tones against the unpleasant buzz of the dentist’s drill. “My dad was kind of a playboy,” she recalls, and reveals his fondness for Lillian Perelson’s cooking. “She was sweet, Lillian…she made tomato soup, with hotdogs cut up in it. My dad thought that was wonderful gourmet cooking, and my mother, who actually was a gourmet cook, rather poo-poohed that.” Dr. Lewis says there was a general feeling that Lillian Perelson and her lawyer father should have been together, and Harold with her mother, Esther: “They would have been much better suited partners,” she says.

I ask Dr. Lewis if she saw any hint of violence in the doctor. “There wasn’t anything strange or bizarre…he was quite a mild-mannered man,” she says. It was the previous doctor who was aggressive, while Perelson was “very gentle,” she tells me, in the first unsettling moment of this investigation. The drilling stops and in the silence, Dr. Lewis says thoughtfully: “He gave good injections.”

Dr. Harold Perelson was an injection specialist. On December 30, 1938, he had filed a patent for a medical device of his own invention. The attachment to a hypodermic syringe was designed to inject drugs directly from a sealed glass capsule, reducing the danger of contamination and spillage. After developing the device for a decade, in 1949 he entered into a verbal agreement with a gentleman called Edward Shustack, a man he hoped would turn “the general idea” of his product into a medical hit. Perelson and Shustack agreed to split the profits. Harold and Lillian Perelson sunk $24,496 into the project. $7,000 came from Lillian’s own savings.

According to court documents, Shustack spent 11 more years developing the magic syringe for sale. But he had no intention of giving the doctor any of the money. In a complaint filed on July 21, 1952, Perelson claimed that Shustack, using a fake name, spirited away his rights to the device. A shady corporation “masked the deception of fraud,” the court heard, and the doctor was double-crossed. Furious, Perelson sued, demanding compensation of $100,000, (nearly a million dollars in today’s money). But the case was long and drawn out. After two years of expensive legal posturing, the court awarded Perelson just $23,956. It is not known if the syringe ever came to market.

Three years later, worse luck arrived for the Perelson family. On November 3, 1957, Judye was driving her siblings in her father’s ’52 Oldsmobile. As she crossed the intersection of Vermont and Los Feliz boulevards, she collided with another car. Judye suffered hand and knee injuries, concussion and “severe shock”; young Joel had a head injury and “severe shock to the nervous system”; Deborah’s cheek was sliced open. The other driver, Eleanor Keller, claimed that Judye, then 16, drove through a red light without looking. But Dr. Perelson took the Keller family to court, claiming Eleanor’s carelessness and negligence caused the crash. He demanded $20,000 in damages for each daughter, and a further $10,000 for his son. He won. But the court awarded just a fraction of what he sought, only enough to cover the medical bills. It was another bittersweet victory in the courts, and another blow to the family’s finances.

“My family are on the merry-go-round again, same problems, same worries, only tenfold,” Judye wrote to an aunt just before the murder-suicide in 1959. “My parents, so to speak, are in a bind financially.” Money problems had also taken their toll on the doctor’s health. “He had a couple of coronaries, they put him on the coronary ward,” recalls Dr. Lewis. “I was 14 at the time… Judye would come over to our house with some regularity.”

Dr. Lewis describes Judye as an uncomplicated teenager, who was too old to be considered a friend. “I was a kid by comparison,” she says. “My mom designed hats and clothes for the studios, she was quite handy with sewing things. Judye would bring something over, like a size 14, and there was Judye, a size two, and she’d say, ‘Can’t we just take it in?’” Dr. Lewis uses her hands to draw a petite female form beside the empty dentist’s chair. “Here’s the tent…and here’s Judye.”

Yearbooks from Barrister High School in 1958 show Judye was popular, a member of the “Girls’ League,” and secretary of the student body. Outside of school, Judye was an usherette at the Huntington Hartford Theater, on Hollywood and Vine, a glitzy, mid-century auditorium fashioned from white Vermont marble and gold fittings. Dr. Lewis recalls seeing towers of shoeboxes in the home, a result of Judye’s love for shopping. She was driving a sports car just before the killings, a newspaper said, suggesting that the Perelson family’s reversal in fortunes had not affected her spending. But Judye’s father was changing. The good doctor was no longer driven by the ambition to succeed, to invent, to heal, to help others. His reading became darker. That summer of ’59 he turned to melancholy books.

So much has been speculated about the doctor’s violent attack, yet so little facts are known about the deaths themselves. The Los Angeles Coroner’s Office had the answers, hidden away in archives. The autopsy reports made for unpleasant reading, and included grim diagrams of the family’s injuries. Opening the envelope was the second chilling moment of this investigation. Yet now the brutal truth of that night can be accurately told, for the first time.