It was the beginning of a long hot summer. I flew to Los Angeles on July 5, 1983, for an indefinite stay. Throughout the flight from New York I engaged in diligent conversation with the stranger next to me, postponing as long as possible facing the feelings of dread within me. My two sons, Griffin and Alex, had preceded me out from New York. Alex, the younger one, met me at the airport, and we drove into Beverly Hills to the house where my former wife, Ellen Griffin Dunne, called Lenny, lives. Griffin was already there. It is not the house we lived in as a family. It is smaller and on one level. Lenny has multiple sclerosis and is confined to a wheelchair. We were gathering, a family again, for a murder trial. The first time I saw Lenny she was getting off a train at the railroad station in Hartford, Connecticut. She was ravishing, and I knew that instant that I would marry her if she would have me. We had a large wedding at her family’s ranch in Nogales, Arizona, in 1954, and after living briefly in New York, we moved to Beverly Hills, where I worked for twenty-five years in television and films. We had five children, two of whom died when they were only a few days old. Long divorced, we have, rightly or wrongly, never become unmarried. Often I have felt through the years that our lives might have been better if we had just stuck out the difficult years of our marriage, but I do not know if she would agree with that. We never venture into the realm of what might have been. I refer to her in conversation as my wife, never my ex-wife, and there is not a day in which she does not occupy my thoughts for some period of time. We communicate regularly and mail each other clippings we cut out of newspapers, and I no longer resent, as I once did, addressing her as Mrs. E. Griffin Dunne rather than as Mrs. Dominick Dunne.

When the telephone in my New York apartment woke me up at five o’clock in the morning on October 31, 1982, I sensed as I reached for the receiver that disaster loomed. Detective Harold Johnston of the Los Angeles Homicide Bureau told me that my twenty-two-year-old daughter, Dominique, was near death at the Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. I asked him if he had notified my wife. He said he was calling from her house. Lenny got on the phone and said, “I need you.” “What happened?” I asked, afraid to hear. “Sweeney,” she answered. “I’ll be on the first plane.” I called Griffin, then twenty-seven, who lives two blocks away from me in New York, and within minutes he was at my door. He called TWA and reserved a seat on the next flight. Then he went to an automatic teller machine and got me money. As I threw clothes into a suitcase, I hesitated over a black suit and tie, thinking they might be bad luck, but I packed them. Before I got into the taxi, I hugged Griffin and kissed him. He was to go then to the apartment of my second son, Alex, and break the news to him. Uniquely individual, Alex chose to live with no telephone on Pitt Street in a relatively inaccessible part of New York. Only Alex, of the four of us, had voiced his dislike of John Sweeney when Dominique introduced him into our lives. She had brought him to New York several months earlier for the boys and me to meet. Dominique was a successful young television actress who had just made her first major feature film, Poltergeist. Sweeney was the head chef at Ma Maison, a West Hollywood restaurant so concerned with its fashionable image that it had an unlisted telephone number to discourage the hoi polloi from entering its portals. We watched an episode of the television series Fame in which Dominique was the guest star, and then went out to dinner. At one moment when the four of us were alone, the boys teased Dominique about marriage, and she said, oh no, she was not going to get married, and I knew she meant it. I was relieved, for although I could see that Sweeney was excessively devoted to her, there was something off-putting about him. That night I phoned her mother and said, “He is much more in love with her than she is with him,” and Lenny said, “You’re absolutely right.” The next morning Alex told me of an incident that had occurred in P. J. Clarke’s after I left them. While Sweeney was in the men’s room, a man at the bar recognized Dominique as the older sister in Poltergeist and called out one of her lines from the film: “What’s happening?” Dominique screams that line when evil spirits start to take over her home and cause frightening things to happen. A film clip of that scene had been shown so often on television that the line was familiar to people all over the country. There was no flirtation; it was the case of a slightly tipsy fan delighted to be in the presence of an actress he had seen in a film. But when Sweeney returned to the table and saw the man talking to Dominique, he became enraged. He picked up the man and shook him. Alex said that Sweeney’s reaction was out of all proportion to the incident going on. Alex said he was scary. The following day I arrived a few minutes late at Lutèce, where I was meeting Dominique and Sweeney for lunch. They had not yet arrived, so I sat at a table in the bar to wait for them. I finished one Perrier and ordered another, and was beginning to think there had been a misunderstanding about either the time or the place when they entered the restaurant. It was a hot summer day, and Dominique looked marvelous in a starched white organdy dress, very California-looking. I was immediately aware that she had been crying, and that there was tension between them. The chef made a great fuss over Sweeney. There was kissing on both cheeks, and they spoke together in French. At the chef’s suggestion we ate the spécialité of the day, whatever it was, but the lunch was not a success. I found Sweeney ill at ease, nervous, difficult to talk to. It occurred to me that Dominique might have difficulty extricating herself from such a person, but I did not pursue the thought. On the Fourth of July the three of us dined at the River Café under the Brooklyn Bridge. It was a lovely night, and we were at a window table where we could watch the fireworks. Sweeney told me he intended to leave Ma Maison. He said he had backing from a consortium of French and Japanese businessmen and was going to open his own restaurant on Melrose Place, a highly desirable location in Los Angeles. Never once did he speak affectionately of his employer, Patrick Terrail, a member of the French restaurant family that owns the Tour d’Argent in Paris. In fact, I suspected there were bad feelings between them.

On that endless flight to Los Angeles I did not allow myself to consider the possibility of her death. She was making a pilot at Warner Bros. for an NBC miniseries called V, and I remember thinking that they would have to shoot around her until she was on her feet again. Five weeks earlier she had broken up with John Sweeney, and he had moved out of the house they shared in West Hollywood. Her explanation to me at the time was, “He’s not in love with me, Dad. He’s obsessed with me. It’s driving me crazy.” Two other daughters preceding Dominique died in infancy from a lung disease once common in cesarean births known as hyaline membrane disease. Dominique was all three daughters in one to us, triply loved. She adored her older brothers and was always totally at ease in a sophisticated world without being sophisticated herself. She was a collector of stray animals; in her menagerie were a cat with a lobotomy and a large dog with stunted legs. She went to Westlake School in Los Angeles, then to Taft School in Connecticut, then to Fountain Valley School in Colorado. After that she spent a year in Florence, where she learned to speak Italian. Twice she and I took trips to Italy together. Extravagantly emotional, she was heartbroken when Lenny gave up the family home on Walden Drive because her worsening condition had made it unmanageable. I was not surprised when Dominique announced her intention to become an actress. Griffin, who is an actor and a producer, later said jokingly that one day she decided to become an actress and the next week she was on a back lot making a movie, and that from then on she never stopped. It was very nearly true. She loved being an actress and was passionate about her career. By the time I arrived in Los Angeles at noon that Sunday, the report that Dominique had been strangled outside her home by her former boyfriend and was in a coma at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center was on all the news channels and stations. Mart Crowley, the author of The Boys in the Band, the film version of which I had produced, met me at the airport and filled me in with what little information he had got from Lenny. Lenny’s house on Crescent Drive was full of people when we got there. (It would stay that way from early morning until late at night for the next seven or eight days, during which relay teams of friends manned the telephones, screened the calls, handled the coffee detail, accepted the endless deliveries of flowers, made all the arrangements for our day-to-day living.) All the television sets and radios were on for news bulletins. In the midst of this confusion sat Lenny in her wheelchair. She was very calm. “The news is not good,” she said to me. And within minutes I heard the words “brain damage” being whispered around the house. Lenny’s mother, who had heard the news on the radio, was on her way from San Diego. Griffin and Alex’s plane would be in in a few hours. My relatives in Hartford called, and, as the news spread, so did friends in New York and London. A doctor at the hospital telephoned for my permission to insert a bolt into Dominique’s skull to relieve the pressure on her brain. Was it absolutely necessary, I asked. Yes, he replied. All right, I said. I asked him when we could go and see her. Not yet, he said. The boys arrived, ashen-faced. When the time came to go to the hospital, we were full of dreadful apprehension. Some friends said to Lenny, “You mustn’t go. It would be a terrible mistake to look at her this way. You must remember her as she was.” They were, of course, thinking of Lenny’s health; stress is the worst thing for multiple sclerosis victims. She replied, “The mistake would be if I didn’t see her. That is what I would have to live with.” The four of us proceeded in silence through the maze of corridors leading to the intensive care unit on the fifth floor of Cedars-Sinai. One of us, I don’t remember which, pushed Lenny’s wheelchair, and the other two flanked her—a formation we would automatically fall into many times in the year that followed. Outside the double doors of the unit are printed instructions telling you to buzz and announce yourself. I did so: “The family of Dominique Dunne is here.” We were told to wait, that someone would come out and get us. Several people were standing there, among them the actor George Hamilton. We exchanged greetings. George said his brother was also in the ICU, and that he had been there the night before when Dominique was brought in. Another man introduced himself to us as Ken Johnson, the director of the pilot Dominique was working on. Waiting nearby was a young actor in the same film named David Packer, his eyes red from crying. Packer, we learned, had been in Dominique’s house at the time of the attack and had called the police, albeit too late. Later we also learned that Packer became so frightened by the struggle he heard outside on the lawn that he left a message on a friend’s answering machine saying, “If I die tonight, it was by John Sweeney.” A nurse appeared and told us that after we had seen Dominique the doctors would want to talk with us. She said that no one but immediate family would be allowed in, and asked us to show identification. They were afraid the press would try to pass themselves off as members of the family. She warned us that it would be a shock to look at her, that we should be prepared. I worried about Lenny and looked over at her. She closed her eyes, bowed her head, and took a deep breath. I watched her will strength into herself, through some inner spiritual force, in a moment so intensely private that I dared not, even later, question her about it. Of the four of us, she was the strongest when we entered the room. At first I did not realize that the person on the bed was Dominique. There were tubes in her everywhere, and the life-support system caused her to breathe in and out with a grotesque jerking movement that seemed a parody of life. Her eyes were open, massively enlarged, staring sightlessly up at the ceiling. Her beautiful hair had been shaved off. A large bolt had been screwed into her skull to relieve the pressure on her brain. Her neck was purpled and swollen; vividly visible on it were the marks of the massive hands of the man who had strangled her. It was nearly impossible to look at her, but also impossible to look away. Lenny wheeled her chair to the bed, took Dominique’s hand in hers, and spoke to her in a voice of complete calm. “Hello, my darling, it’s Mom. We’re all here, Dominique. Dad and Griffin and Alex. We love you.” Her words released us, and the boys and I stepped forward and surrounded the bed, each touching a different part of Dominique. The nurses had said that she could not hear us, but we felt she could, and took turns talking to her. We prayed for her to live even though we knew that it would be best for her to die. There is a small conference room in the ICU where we met periodically over the next four days to discuss her ebbing life. Dr. Edward Brettholz told us that the brain scan was even, meaning that it showed no life, but that it would be necessary to take three more scans so that, in the trial ahead, the defense could not claim that Cedars-Sinai had removed Dominique from the life-support system too soon. This was the first mention of a trial. In the shocked state in which we were operating, we had not yet started to deal with the fact that a murder had taken place. On the fourth day Lenny said, quite unexpectedly, to the doctors, “When Dominique dies, we would like her organs donated to the hospital.” The boys and I knew that was exactly what Dominique would have wanted, but it would not have occurred to us to say so at that moment. Lenny, ill herself with a disease for which there was no cure, understood. Dr. Gray Elrod, with tears in his eyes, said two patients in the hospital were waiting for kidney transplants. We then went in and said good-bye to Dominique for the last time before they took her off the support system. She was wheeled to surgery for the removal of her kidneys, and transplant operations took place almost immediately. Her heart was sent to a hospital in San Francisco. Then her body was turned over to the coroner for autopsy.

In the Los Angeles Times a day or so after the attack, Patrick Terrail, the owner of Ma Maison, described his chef, John Sweeney, as a “very dependable young man” and said he would obtain the best legal representation for him. He made no comment about Dominique, whom he knew, as he knew us, and throughout the long ordeal that followed he did not call on us or write us a letter of condolence. Since it was too early then to deal with the magnitude of my feelings for the killer of my daughter, Patrick Terrail became the interim object of my growing rage. Obtaining the best legal representation for Sweeney took an economy turn when a public defender, Michael Adelson, was assigned to handle the case. We heard from Detective Johnston that Adelson was highly acclaimed and doggedly tough. Assisting the public defender, however, was Joseph Shapiro, the legal counsel for Ma Maison and a member of the prestigious law firm of Donovan Leisure Newton & Irvine. Although Shapiro’s role on the defense team was later played down, he was an ever-present but elusive figure from the night following the murder, when he visited Sweeney in the Beverly Hills jail, right up until the day of the verdict, when he exulted in the courtroom. At the time of the murder Dominique was consistently identified in the press as the niece of my brother and sister-in-law, John Gregory Dunne and Joan Didion, rather than as the daughter of Lenny and me. At first I was too stunned by the killing for this to matter, but as the days passed, it bothered me. I spoke to Lenny about it one morning in her bedroom. She said, “Oh, what difference does it make?” with such despair in her voice that I felt ashamed to be concerned with such a trivial matter at such a crucial time. In the room with us was my former mother-in-law, Beatriz Sandoval Griffin Goodwin, the widow of Lenny’s father, Thomas Griffin, an Arizona cattle rancher, and of Lenny’s stepfather, Ewart Goodwin, an insurance tycoon and rancher. She is a strong, uncompromising woman who has never not stated exactly what was on her mind in any given situation, a trait that has made her respected if not always endearing. “Listen to what he’s saying to you,” she said emphatically to Lenny. “It sounds as if Dominique was an orphan raised by her aunt and uncle.” Lenny looked up with a changed expression. “And,” added her mother, to underscore the point, “she had two brothers as well.” “You handle it,” Lenny said to me. I called the publicist Rupert Allan, a family friend, and explained the situation to him. “It’s hurtful to us. It’s as if we had not only lost her but been denied parentage as well,” I said. “It’ll be taken care of,” Rupert said, and it was.

On the morning of November 4, while the autopsy was going on, I went to visit the elderly monsignor at the Church of the Good Shepherd in Beverly Hills to make the arrangements for Dominique’s funeral. In years past this church was jokingly referred to as our Lady of the Cadillacs for the affluence of its parishioners. The housekeeper at the rectory told me the monsignor was in the church saying Mass. I waited in the front pew until he finished. Then I went back into the vestry with him and explained my reason for coming. He had read of the murder in the newspapers, and I thought I detected in him a slight hesitation over having the funeral of a murder victim in the Good Shepherd Church. I explained to him that we had once been members of the parish, that Dominique had been christened there by him twenty-two years earlier, and that he had come to our home afterward to the reception. The memory was dim to him, so I persisted. I said that Martin Manulis, the producer, who would be giving the eulogy at the funeral, was Dominique’s godfather, but that evoked no remembrance either. I then said that Maria Cooper was Dominique’s godmother, and at that he looked up. He remembered Maria well, he said, the beautiful daughter of Rocky and Gary Cooper. He told me he had given Gary Cooper the last rites when he died, and had performed the funeral Mass. He said he had always hoped Maria would be a nun but that, alas, she had married a Jewish fella (the pianist Byron Janis). By now the church was a certainty. We discussed the music that I wanted played, and settled at eleven a.m. Saturday, November 6, for the funeral. On November 5 we discovered that he monsignor had also booked a wedding into the Good Shepherd Church at eleven o’clock on Saturday morning. The mistake came to light when the groom-to-be read in one of Dominique’s obituaries that her funeral was to be at the same time and place as his wedding. He telephoned the church, and the church notified us. Griffin, Alex, Martin Manulis, and I went to the rectory late in the afternoon to try to straighten matters out. We waited endlessly, but the monsignor did not appear. The boys became impatient and began yelling up the stairs of the rectory. Finally a priest with a heavy Flemish accent came down, but he did not seem anxious to get mixed up in an error that was not of his making. When we pointed out to him that pandemonium was likely to occur the following morning unless steps were taken, he cooperated in figuring out a plan. As the wedding people refused to move their marriage up an hour, we agreed to have the funeral an hour later. It was too late to inform the newspapers, so we arranged for twelve ushers to be at the church at ten-thirty to tell people arriving for the funeral to come back an hour later. “I cannot comprehend how such an error could have been made,” I said to the priest. “It’s even worse than you realize, Mr. Dunne,” he replied. “What do you mean?” “The groom in the wedding is a friend of the man who murdered your daughter.” That night on the news we watched John Sweeney being arraigned for Dominique’s murder. He was accompanied by the defense team of Michael Adelson and Joseph Shapiro. As we watched, we all began to feel guilty for not having spoken out our true feelings about Sweeney when there was still time to save Dominique from him. In the days that followed, her friends began to tell us how terrified she was of him during the last weeks of her life. I found out for the first time that five weeks previously he had assaulted her and choked her, and that she had escaped from him and broken off her relationship with him. Fred Leopold, a family friend and the former mayor of Beverly Hills, told us during a condolence call that he heard from a secretary in his law office that John Sweeney had severely beaten another woman a year or so earlier. We passed on this information to Detective Harold Johnston, who stayed close to our family during those days. Later that night, the eve of the funeral, Dominique appeared on two television programs that had been previously scheduled. Also on television that night was a film I had produced, never before seen on television, and another film my brother had written, also being shown for the first time. We did not watch any of them. The day of the funeral, November 6, was incredibly hot. Riding the few blocks from Lenny’s house on Crescent Drive to the Good Shepherd Church at Santa Monica Boulevard and Bedford Drive, I noticed that the tinsel Christmas decorations were going up on the lampposts of Beverly Hills. As the limousine pulled up in front of the church, I was deeply touched to see Dr. Brettholz from Cedars-Sinai in the crowd arriving for the service. Lenny, her mother, Griffin, Alex, and I were in the first car. When the chauffeur opened the door for us to get out, a hot gust of wind blew multicolored wedding confetti into the car. The boys helped their grandmother out, and then we got the wheelchair out of the trunk and moved Lenny from the car into the chair. “There’s the mother,” we heard someone say, and a phalanx of photographers and television cameramen descended on us, coming within a foot of Lenny’s face. Because there were so many steps in the front of the church, we decided to take the wheelchair around to the back, where there was a ramp entrance for handicapped people. The cameramen and photographers walked backward in front of us, shooting film. “No matter what they do, don’t say anything,” I said to the boys. Lenny has extraordinary dignity. Dressed curiously for a funeral in a long lavender dress with pearls and a large straw hat, she made no attempt to turn away from the television cameramen. They seemed to respect her, and one by one they dropped away. The church was filled to capacity, not with curiosity seekers attracted by the sensationalism of Dominique’s death, but with people who knew her and loved her. During the service the boys read a poem by Yeats, and Martin Manulis, who had brought me to California twenty-six years earlier to work for him on Playhouse 90, delivered the eulogy. “Every year of her life,” he said, “we spent Christmas Eve together at a carol sing at our house. When she could barely talk, she stood between her brothers and sang what resembled ‘O Little Town of Bethlehem’ and spoke a single line from the Gospel of Saint Luke, taught to her patiently by her doting parents: ‘Because there was no room at the inn.’ And standing there with those huge grave eyes, she was, in life, an infanta by Goya, only more beautiful.”

A few nights after the funeral Lenny and I sat in her bedroom, she in her bed, I on it, and watched Dominique in Hill Street Blues. The episode had been dedicated to her on the air by the producers. We did not talk. We did not cry. We simply stared at the set. She looked so incredibly young. She played a battered child. What we would not know until the trial was that the marks on her neck were real, from John Sweeney’s assault on her five weeks before he killed her.

On my first day back in New York after the funeral, I was mugged leaving the subway at twelve noon in Times Square. I thought I was the only person on the stairway I was ascending to the street, but suddenly I was grabbed from behind and pulled off balance. I heard the sound of a switchblade opening, and a hand—which was all I ever saw of my assailant—reached around and held the knife in front of my face. From out of my mouth came a sound of rage that I did not know I was capable of making. It was more animal than human, and I was later told it had been heard a block away. Within seconds people came running from every direction. In his panic my assailant superficially slashed my chin with the blade of his knife, but I had beaten him. I had both my wallet and my life, and I realized that, uncourageous as I am about physical combat, I would have fought before giving in. Whoever that nameless, faceless man was, to me he was John Sweeney.

If Dominique had been killed in an automobile accident, horrible as that would have been, at least it would have been over, and mourning could have begun. A murder is an ongoing event until the day of the sentencing, and mourning has to be postponed. After several trips west for preliminary hearings, I returned to Los Angeles in July for the trial. For a while I drove Dominique’s electric blue convertible Volkswagen. It had stood unused in the driveway of Lenny’s house since the murder, a reminder of her that we neither wanted to look at nor could bear to get rid of. I felt strange in the car, too old by far to be driving it; I could always imagine her in it, young and pretty, driving too fast, her beautiful long hair streaming behind her. In the glove compartment I found a pair of her sunglasses, the ones she called her Annie Hall glasses. I had bought them for her in Florence when I visited her in school there. I took them out of the glove compartment and put them in my briefcase. Throughout the trial, when the going got rough, I would hold them in my hand, or touch them in the inside pocket of my jacket next to my heart, as if I could derive strength from her through them. Alex was living on Crescent Drive with Lenny. Griffin and his girlfriend, the actress Brooke Adams, had rented a house in Malibu. I was staying at my old friend Tom McDermott’s house in Holmby Hills. On the Saturday afternoon before the Monday morning when the jury selection was to start, Lenny rounded us up at her house. She had received a call from a journalist friend of the family, who said he wanted to meet with us to deliver a message from Mike Adelson, the defense attorney representing John Sweeney. We all had curious feelings about the meeting. Why should the lawyer for our daughter’s murderer be contacting us through a journalist rather than through the district attorney? At that point in the proceedings our relationship with the district attorney, Steven Barshop, was still very formal. We called him Mr. Barshop, and he called us Mr. and Mrs. Dunne. We did not even have his home telephone number. We decided in advance that no matter what was said to us at the meeting we would listen to the message and make no comment. The purpose of the journalist’s visit was to offer us a plea bargain so that the case would not have to go to trial. He said that Sweeney was full of remorse and was willing to go to prison. Sweeney would plead guilty to a reduced charge of manslaughter and would serve seven and a half years, but he wanted the assault charge, based on his attack on Dominique five weeks before the murder, dropped. The journalist said that Adelson saw the case, not as a crime, but as a tragedy, of “a blue-collar kid who got mixed up in Beverly Hills society and couldn’t handle it.” We had been down the plea bargain road before. Five months earlier, in February, after the preliminary hearing on the assault charge, a plea bargain had been offered to us by Adelson through the district attorney. At that time we had accepted it, feeling that Lenny’s health would be endangered by the trial. I had also seen at the hearing what a ruthless player Adelson was in the courtroom. Later, in May, Adelson had reneged on the plea bargain and opened up the whole matter of the trial, which we thought had been put to rest. Now, within two days of the beginning of jury selection, we were being offered, through a third party, another plea bargain, from which the district attorney had simply been excluded. I felt distrustful and manipulated. I despised the fact that we were supposed to be moved that Sweeney was remorseful and “willing” to serve seven and a half years. Although the journalist was only a messenger in the situation, the meeting became strained as he presented Adelson’s viewpoints. Doubts were put in our minds about the ability of Steven Barshop. There was even a suggestion that Dominique was a participant in the crime. Neighbors would be called, we were told, who would testify that fights were commonplace between Dominique and Sweeney. The journalist said that if the two snitches who had come forward were put on the stand, Adelson would “cut them off at the knees.” At the time I didn’t know what snitches were; they are fellow prisoners who betray confidences of the cell for lessened sentences. (One prisoner reported that Sweeney had confessed to him that he thought he had the police believing he had not intended to kill Dominique, and another said that Sweeney had told him that Dominique was a snob, too ambitious, who deserved what she got.) The journalist talked a great deal about a lawyer called Paul Fitzgerald. In the months ahead I was never to meet Fitzgerald, but he was often presented in conversation as a sage of the court system, with detractors as vocal as his admirers. A former public defender, Fitzgerald was occasionally appointed as a conflict lawyer by Judge Burton S. Katz, in whose courtroom the case was being tried. A rumor persisted after the trial that he wrote Judge Katz’s astonishing reversal speech on the day of the sentencing. He was also a close friend of Michael Adelson’s. On that Saturday afternoon, before the jury selection had begun, Paul Fitzgerald was identified as the source of the information, reiterated again and again by the journalist who visited us, that Mike Adelson was a wonderful man. It had not been my personal experience to find Mike Adelson a wonderful man. Twice during the February preliminary hearing he had addressed me in the corridor outside the courtroom as Mr. Sweeney, as if mistaking me for the father of the killer rather than the father of the victim. A seasoned courtroom observer suggested to me that since I was a sympathetic figure in the courtroom, it had been Adelson’s intention, by this obvious error, to incite me to make some kind of slur on him in public. During that same hearing a young friend of Dominique’s named Bryan Cook recounted a night on the town with his girlfriend, Denise Dennehy, and Dominique and Sweeney during which several bottles of champagne were consumed. Singling Dominique out from the quartet of celebrants, Adelson, in questioning Cook, asked several times, “When Miss Dunne got in from the bars, how drunk was she?” The obvious intent of this ugly repetition was to give the impression in the courtroom that my actress daughter was an out-on-the-town drunkard. No amount of laudatory comment, after those preliminary hearings, would ever convince me that Mike Adelson was a wonderful man. Mustached and extremely short, his head topped with a full toupee, Adelson made me think of an angry miniature bulldog. The journalist’s mission, though instigated with good intentions, only engendered bad feelings. At nine o’clock on Monday morning, July 11, we gathered in Steven Barshop’s office in the Santa Monica Courthouse. Alternately tough-talking and professional, the district attorney is about forty. He achieved public recognition for his prosecution of the killers of Sarai Ribicoff, the journalist niece of Senator Abraham Ribicoff. We felt lucky that Barshop had been assigned to our case by Robert Philibosian, the district attorney of Los Angeles County, but we felt that he did not want any personal involvement with us. Although never discourteous, he was brusque, and he made it very clear that he was running the show and would not tolerate any interference. Barshop was angered when we told him that a plea bargain had been offered to us by Adelson through a journalist. “You didn’t accept it, did you?” he asked. We said we had not. “The matter is out of your hands,” he said. “The state wishes to proceed with this trial.” That day he gave us his home phone number, and for the first time we called each other by our first names.

The cast of characters was gathering. Down the corridor from the district attorney’s office several hundred potential jurors were milling about, waiting to be called for examination. Observing the scene from the benches along the wall was a group known as the courthouse groupies, old people from Santa Monica who come to the courthouse every day to watch the murder trials. They know all the judges, all the lawyers, all the cases, and all the gossip. An old man in a blue polka-dot shirt and a baseball hat with “Hawaii” on it announced to the group that he was waiting to see Sweeney. “Who’s Sweeney?” asked an old woman with jet black, tightly permed hair. “The guy who killed the movie star,” he answered. “What movie star?” “Dominique somebody.” “Never heard of her.”

I asked a middle-aged woman in black slacks and a tan blouse who was carrying a small red suitcase and peering in the windows of the doors to Courtroom D where everyone was. She said they had broken for lunch. I asked what time they would be back, and she said at two o’clock. I thanked her. My son Alex told me the woman was Sweeney’s mother, who had just arrived after a two-day bus trip from Hazleton, Pennsylvania. I had not thought of Sweeney in terms of family, although I knew he had divorced parents and was the oldest of six children, and that his mother had been a battered wife. It was a well-known fact among the people who knew John Sweeney that he had long since put distance between himself and his family. Alex said that he had been sitting next to Mrs. Sweeney in the courtroom earlier, not knowing who she was, when Joseph Shapiro came over to her, addressed her by name, and said that he disliked being the one to give her the message, but her son did not wish to see her. Alex said her eyes had filled with tears. For the next seven weeks we sat across the aisle from her every day, and though we never spoke, we felt compassion for her and knew that she in turn felt compassion for us in the dreadful situation that interlocked our families. The jury selection took two weeks. Each side could eliminate, by way of peremptory challenge, twenty-six people from the main jury before arriving at the twelve, and six from the alternate jury before arriving at the six. People who had had violent crimes in their families were automatically excused. Women activists and people of obvious intelligence who asked pertinent questions were eliminated by the defense. “What I’m looking for are twelve fascists, and Adelson’s looking for twelve bleeding-heart liberals or weirdos, and we’ll arrive somewhere in between,” said Steven Barshop to me at one point. Adelson had announced that his defense would be based mostly on psychiatric findings. A writer-photographer who was being questioned said he would not accept the testimony of psychiatrists and psychologists as fact. He further said he found defense attorneys manipulative, to which Adelson replied, “Suppose you don’t like the way I comb my hair. Would that affect the way you listen to the testimony?” I found this an extraordinary image for a lawyer who wore a toupee to use, and then I realize that he must think that we thought that the quarter pound of hair taped to the top of his head was real. This would help me later to understand the total conviction with which he presented his client’s version of the events surrounding the murder, which we knew to be untrue. Presiding over the case was Judge Burton S. Katz. In his forties, Judge Katz gives the impression of a man greatly pleased with his good looks. He is expensively barbered, deeply tanned, and noticeably dressed in a manner associated more with Hollywood agents than with Superior Court judges. He has tinted aviator glasses, and on the first day he was wearing designer jeans, glossy white loafers, and no necktie beneath his judicial robes. Every seat in the courtroom was filled, and Judge Katz seemed to like playing to the audience. His explanations to the prospective jurors were concise and clear, and he made himself pleasing to them. He said funny things to make them laugh, but then was careful to warn them against levity. The completed jury consisted of nine men and three women. The man who became the foreman ran a string of bowling alleys. One of the men was a postman, another a butcher. One worked for an airline and another for a computer company. One was a teacher. One had a juvenile delinquent son serving on a work farm. Two of the men were black. One of the women was an Irish Catholic widow with six children, including a twenty-two-year-old daughter. Although we had hoped for more women, we were pleased with the makeup of the jury. On the instructions of the judge, not so much as a nod was ever exchanged between us, not even when we lunched in the same restaurant or met in the lavatory. However, I felt I grew to know them as the weeks passed, even though Steven Barshop often told me, “Don’t ever anticipate a jury. They’ll fool you every time.” Judge Katz’s relationship with the jury bordered on the flirtatious, and they responded in kind. If the court was called for ten, Judge Katz invariably began around eleven, with elaborate and charming apologies to the jury. One Monday morning he told them he had had a great weekend in Ensenada, that he had had the top down on his car both ways, and that he wished they had been with him. The ladies laughed delightedly and the men grinned back at him. Our family was never favored with Judge Katz’s charms, not even to the point of simple courtesies. For seven weeks he mispronounced Dominique’s name, insistently calling her by my name, Dominick. People wandered in and out of the courtroom; lawyers from other cases chatted with the clerk or used the bailiff’s telephone. The microphone on the witness stand fell off its moorings innumerable times and either went dead or emitted a loud electronic screech, and it was never fixed. It is the fashion among the criminal fraternity to find God, and Sweeney, the killer, was no exception. He arrived daily in the courtroom clutching a Bible, dressed in black, looking like a sacristan. The Bible was a prop; Sweeney never read it, he just rested his folded hands on it. He also wept regularly. One day the court had to be recessed because he claimed the other prisoners had been harassing him before he entered, and he needed time to cry in private. I could not believe that the jurors would buy such a performance. “You mark my words,” said Steven Barshop, watching him. “Something weird is going to happen in this trial. I can feel it.”

On July 20 Barshop called us to say that Adelson did not want Lenny at the trial because her presence in a wheelchair would create undue sympathy for her that would be prejudicial to Sweeney. She was to appear in court the following day so that the judge could hear what she had to say and decide if it was relevant to the trial. We began to worry. It was becoming apparent that nearly everything Adelson requested was being granted. Adelson recognized Katz’s enormous appetite for flattery and indulged it shamelessly. A camaraderie sprang up between the judge and the public defender, and the diminutive Adelson made himself a willing participant in a running series of “short” jokes indulged by the judge at his expense to the delight of the jury. It was becoming equally apparent that the district attorney, Steven Barshop, was ill favored by the judge. Lenny did not take the stand the following day. She was preceded by Lillian Pierce, who had been a girlfriend of John Sweeney’s before my daughter. Detective Harold Johnston had tracked her down after receiving a telephone tip from Lynne Brennan, a Beverly Hills publicist, who had once been her friend and knew her story. Lillian Pierce appeared by subpoena issued by the prosecution and was known in advance to be a reluctant witness. Later we heard that she had sat in a car outside the church at Dominique’s funeral and cried, feeling too guilty to go inside. At Adelson’s request, her testimony was given out of the presence of the jury in order to determine its admissibility as evidence. An attractive and well-dressed woman in her thirties, Lillian Pierce was very nervous and kept glancing over at Sweeney, who did not look at her. She had, she admitted, been in contact the day before with Joseph Shapiro, the Ma Maison lawyer. When the district attorney started to question her, her account of her relationship with John Sweeney was so shocking that it should have put to rest forever the defense stand that the strangulation death of Dominique Dunne at the hands of John Sweeney was an isolated incident. He was, it became perfectly apparent, a classic abuser of women, and his weapon was his hands. Lillian Pierce said that on ten separate occasions during their two-year relationship he had beaten her. She had been hospitalized twice, once for six days, once for four. Sweeney had broken her nose, punctured her eardrum, collapsed her lung, thrown rocks at her when she tried to escape from him. She had seen him, she said, foam at the mouth when he lost control, and smash furniture and pictures. As she spoke, the courtroom was absolutely silent. Adelson was incensed by the impact of Lillian Pierce’s story, made more chilling by her quiet recital of all the acts of violence that she had survived. He became vicious with her. “Were you not drunk?” he asked her. “Were you not drugged?” His implication was that she had got what she deserved. He tried repeatedly to get her to veer from her story, but she remained steadfast. “Let me remind you, Miss Pierce,” he said testily at one point, shuffling through a sheaf of papers, “when you met with Mr. Joe Shapiro and me for lunch on November third, you said…” I stopped following the sentence. My mind remained at the date November 3. On November 3 Dominique was still on the life-support system at the Cedars-Sinai. She was not pronounced legally dead until November 4. So even while Dominique lay dying, efforts were being made to free her killer by men who knew very well that this was not his first display of violence. Adelson knew, and sent a journalist to our home with the lachrymose message that he saw Dominique’s death, not as a crime, but as a tragedy. Patrick Terrail had told Detective Johnston that he had seen Sweeney act violently only once, when he “punched out” a telephone booth in the south of France. It is a fact of the legal system that all information gathered by the prosecution relevant to the case is available to the defense. The reverse is not true. If Detective Johnston had not learned about Lillian Pierce from a telephone tip, her existence would have been unknown to us. I felt hatred for Michael Adelson. His object was to win; nothing else mattered. Steven Barshop cross-examined Lillian Pierce. “Let me ask you, Miss Pierce, do you come from a well-to-do family?” Adelson objected. “I am trying to establish a pattern,” Barshop told the judge. At that moment—one of the most extraordinary I have ever experienced—we saw an enraged John Sweeney, his prop Bible flying, jump up from his seat at the counsel table and take off for the rear door of the courtroom which leads to the judge’s chambers and the holding-cell area. Velma Smith, the court clerk, gave a startled cry. Lillian Pierce, on the stand, did the same. We heard someone shout, “Get help!” Silent alarms were activated by Judge Katz and Velma Smith. The bailiff, Paul Turner, leapt to his feet in a pantherlike movement and made a lunge for Sweeney, grasping him around the chest from behind. Within seconds four armed guards rushed into the courtroom, nearly upsetting Lenny’s wheelchair, and surrounded the melee. The bailiff and Sweeney crashed into a file cabinet. “Don’t hurt him!” screamed Adelson. Sweeney was wrestled to the floor and then handcuffed to the arms of his chair, where Adelson whispered frantically to him to get hold of himself. Sobbing, Sweeney apologized to the court and said he had not been trying to escape. Judge Katz accepted his apology. “We know what a strain you are under, Mr. Sweeney,” he said. I was appalled at the lack of severity of the judge’s admonishment. What we had witnessed had nothing to do with escape. It was an explosion of anger. It showed how little it took to incite John Sweeney to active rage. Like most of the telling moments of the trial, however, it was not witnessed by the jury. Mike Tipping, a reporter from the Santa Monica Evening Outlook, saw the episode and reported it in his paper. At the behest of Adelson, the court admonished Tipping for exaggerating the incident. The same day, a court gag order was issued to prevent anyone involved in the case from speaking to the press. From then on, I felt, and continue to feel, that John Sweeney was sedated in the courtroom so that such an incident would never be repeated in front of the jury. He was asked under oath, not in the presence of the jury, if he was sedated, and he said he was not, except for some mild medicine for an upset stomach. The district attorney asked the court for either a blood test or a urine test to substantiate Sweeney’s reply, but Judge Katz denied the request. When Lenny took the stand the first time, the jury was again not present. Judge Katz had to decide on the admissibility of her testimony, but he wrote notes through most of it and scarcely looked in her direction. Lenny described an incident when Dominique came to her house at night after being beaten by Sweeney—the first of the three times he beat her. Dominique’s terror was so abject, Lenny said, that she assumed a fetal position in the hallway. Sweeney had knocked her head on the floor and pulled out clumps of her hair. Adelson asked Lenny if she knew what the argument that precipitated the beating had been about. Lenny said she did not. He asked her if she knew that Dominique had had an abortion. She didn’t. I didn’t. The boys didn’t. Her closest friends didn’t. It remained throughout the trial an unsubstantiated charge that, to the defense, seemed to justify the beating. The look on Lenny’s face was heartbreaking, as if she had been slapped in public. Judge Katz called her testimony hearsay and said he would make his decision as to its admissibility when the trial resumed on August 15 after a two-week hiatus.

During this period our great friend Katie Manulis died of cancer. Our lives have been intricately involved with the Manuli, as we call them, for twenty-five years. Back at Martin’s house after the funeral, I told Sammy Goldwyn that I had grave doubts about the judge. I cited his solicitousness toward Sweeney after his outburst in the courtroom, as well as his discourtesy with Lenny. Sammy said he was dining that evening with John Van de Kamp, the attorney general of the state of California, and he would get a rundown on the judge for me. He reported back that Judge Katz went to law school at Loyola University and then served as a deputy district attorney for fourteen years. He had been unpopular in the district attorney’s office, where he was considered a theatrical character. In 1970 he prosecuted members of the Charles Manson “family” for the murders of Shorty Shea and Gary Hinman. In 1978 he was appointed to the Municipal Court by Governor Jerry Brown, and in 1981 he was appointed to the Superior Court. He was considered highly ambitious and was said to like cases with high media visibility, like this one.

Judge Katz ruled that the prosecution could not use the testimony of Lillian Pierce to show the jury that John Sweeney had committed previous acts of violence against women. He said he would allow Miss Pierce to take the stand only in rebuttal if Adelson put expert witnesses, meaning psychiatrists, on the stand to testify that Sweeney was too mentally impaired by emotion to have formed the intent to kill. Once Judge Katz ruled that, Adelson threw out his psychiatric defense. Later in the trial, when the possibility of putting Lillian Pierce on the stand was raised again, by Steven Barshop, Katz ruled that the “prejudicial effect outweighed the probative value.” The jury would never know of Lillian Pierce’s existence until after they had arrived at a verdict. Judge Katz also ruled that Lenny’s testimony about Dominique’s coming to her in hysterics after Sweeney first beat her on August 27 could not be used by the prosecution during the main case. The judge once again agreed with Adelson that the prejudicial effect of the testimony outweighed its probative value, and he told Barshop not to mention the incident in his primary case. He said he would decide later in the trial whether her story could be used to rebut a mental-impairment defense for Sweeney. Judge Katz agreed with Adelson that all statements made by Dominique to her agent, her fellow actors, and her friends regarding fear of John Sweeney during the last five weeks of her life must be considered hearsay and ruled inadmissible as evidence. It was not an auspicious opening to the trial. The loss of the Lillian Pierce testimony was a severe blow to Steven Barshop. Our hopes were buoyed by Barshop’s opening argument in the case. He began with a description of the participants. Sweeney: twenty-seven, six foot one, 170 pounds. Dominique: twenty-two, five foot one, 112 pounds. He gave a rundown of the charges in the two incidents, the assault on Dominique on September 26 and the murder on the night of October 30. He described how Sweeney had walked out of Ma Maison restaurant at 8:30 that evening and proceeded on foot to the house, where he argued with Dominique and strangled her. He said that Dominique was brain-dead there at the scene of the strangulation, despite the fact that she was kept on the life-support system at Cedars-Sinai until November 4. He said that the coroner would testify that death by strangulation took between four and six minutes. Then he held up a watch with a second hand and said to the jury, “Ladies and gentlemen, I am going to show you how long it took for Dominique Dunne to die.” For four minutes the courtroom sat in hushed silence. It was horrifying. I had never allowed myself to think how long she had struggled in his hands, thrashing for life. A gunshot or a knife stab is over in an instant; strangulation is an eternity. The only sound during the four minutes came from Michael Adelson and John Sweeney, who whispered together the whole time.

Our daily presence in the courtroom annoyed Adelson throughout the trial. Defense lawyers in general don’t like jurors to see the victim’s family. Friends of ours had advised us to leave town until the trial was over. The organization known as Parents of Murdered Children advised us to attend every session. “It’s the last business of your daughter’s life,” a father of a young girl stabbed to death by a former boyfriend said to me on the telephone one night. We sat in the front row behind the bailiff’s desk in full view of the jury: Lenny in the aisle in her wheelchair, Alex, Griffin and his girlfriend, and I. We were within six feet of John Sweeney. As the weeks crept by, the boys became more and more silent. It seemed to me as if their youth were being stripped away from them. In the row behind us sat representatives from Parents of Murdered Children; some had been through their trials, others were awaiting theirs. Many of Dominique’s friends came on a daily basis; so did friends of ours and friends of the boys’. There were also representatives from Women Against Violence Against Women and from Victims for Victims, the group started by Theresa Saldana, an actress who was brutally stabbed a few years ago and survived. “If any member of the Dunne family cries, cries out, rolls his eyes, exclaims in any way, he will be asked to leave the courtroom,” we were told by the judge at the behest of Adelson. “Your honor, Alex Dunne had tears in his eyes,” Adelson called out one day. When Sweeney took the stand, Alex and Griffin changed their seats in order to be in his line of vision. Adelson tried to get them put out of the courtroom for this. We were intimidated but never searched. How easy it would have been to enter with a weapon and eradicate the killer if we had been of that mind. As the last week approached, Alex said one morning, “I can’t go back anymore. I can’t be there where Sweeney is.”

Dominique’s friends Bryan Cook and Denise Dennehy flew in from Lake Forest, Illinois, to testify about the time five weeks before the murder when Sweeney attempted to choke Dominique after their night on the town. She had escaped from her house that night by climbing out a bathroom window and driving her Volkswagen to the home of an artist friend called Norman Carby. (Lenny was in New York at the time.) Carby, appalled by the marks of attempted strangulation on her neck, had the presence of mind to take photographs. The pictures were the prosecution’s prime exhibit of the seriousness of the assault. Adelson belittled the pictures. There was, he said, a third picture in the same series showing Dominique laughing. Carby explained that Dominique had a reading that morning for the role of a battered child on Hill Street Blues. Carby said he told her that at least she wouldn’t have to wear any makeup for it, and that had made her laugh.

One of the snitches appeared in the courtroom. He was the one who claimed Sweeney had said he thought he had the police believing he had not intended to kill Dominique. He claimed further that Sweeney had asked him, “Have you ever been with a girl who thought she was better than you?” Snitches are known to be unreliable witnesses, whom jurors usually dislike and distrust. This man’s dossier, forwarded by his prison, depicted a disturbed troublemaker. His arms were tattooed from his shoulders to his wrists. Steven Barshop decided to dispense with his revelations. He was not put on the stand.

On one of the color pictures of the autopsy there was a bruise on Dominique’s shoulder, which gave rise to disagreement. No one was quite sure if it had been incurred when she fell to the ground after being strangled, or if it had been caused by the life-support system, or if it was a result of the autopsy. Adelson was determined that the jury not see the photograph with the bruise, and the arguments went on endlessly while the jury waited in an adjoining room. Judge Katz solved the matter: with a pair of scissors provided by Velma Smith, the court clerk, he simply cut off the picture below the neck so that only the actual strangulation marks were visible to the jury.

Deputy Frank DeMilio, one of the first to arrive at the scene of the crime, testified on the stand that Sweeney had said to him, “Man, I blew it. I killed her. I didn’t think I choked her that hard, but I don’t know, I just kept on choking her. I just lost my temper and blew it again.” I wondered then and wonder still what the word again meant. Did it refer to one of the other times he attacked Dominique? Or Lillian Pierce? Or is there something else in this mysterious past that has not yet come to light? Sweeney had no car and no driver’s license, an oddity for a young man totally dependent on wheels. And although he had worked as a head chef in one of the most prestigious restaurants in the city, he was nearly totally without funds. Furthermore, an informant at Ma Maison told Detective Johnston of another former girlfriend, then somewhere in France, against whom Sweeney had committed at least one act of violence.

After Steven Barshop rested his case, Judge Katz delivered another devastating blow to the prosecution. He agreed with a request from Adelson that the jury be allowed to consider only charges of manslaughter and second-degree murder, thus acquitting Sweeney of first degree murder. In asking Katz to bar a first degree murder verdict, Adelson argued, “There is no premeditation or deliberation in this case,” and Katz agreed. Barshop argued that the jury should decide whether there was sufficient premeditation or deliberation. He said Sweeney had enough time to consider his actions during the period—up to six minutes, according to the coroner’s testimony—that it took him to choke Dominique. Katz emphasized that Sweeney had arrived at Dominique’s house without a murder weapon, although he knew that Sweeney’s hands had nearly killed Lillian Pierce and that his hands had nearly strangled Dominique five weeks before he killed her. He also cited the fact that Sweeney had made no attempt to escape. Rarely do twelve people on a jury agree; most verdicts are compromises. If this jury had had the option of first-degree murder and were in a dispute, they could have compromised at second-degree. With first-degree ruled out, if there was a dispute, their only compromise was manslaughter. Detective Harold Johnston was in the courtroom that day. He believed this was a case of first-degree murder, just as we did. Means of escape and means of method have nothing to do with premeditation, he told us. An informant at Ma Maison had told us that just before Sweeney left the restaurant to go to Dominique’s house on the night he murdered her, he had ordered two martinis from the bar and drunk them. We felt that Sweeney must have decided that if he couldn’t have Dominique, he hasn’t going to let anyone else have her either. Harold Johnston had become a friend over the year, since the night that he rang the doorbell of Lenny’s house on Crescent Drive at two in the morning to tell her that Dominique was near death at Cedars-Sinai. He had also questioned Sweeney on the night of the murder. He told me in the corridor outside the courtroom that day that the judge’s ruling had made him lose faith in the system after twenty-six years on the force.

One day Adelson’s wife and little boys came to the trial. As if to offset his unpleasant image in front of the jury, Adelson elaborately played father: “Now don’t you talk,” he admonished them, waving his finger. Several times Judge Katz’s mother and father also came to observe the proceedings. They were seated in special chairs set up inside the gate by the bailiff’s desk, and whispered incessantly. Invariably Katz showed off for their benefit. On one occasion, after both Barshop and Adelson had finished with the witness David Packer, the actor who was visiting Dominique at the time of the murder and who called the police, Judge Katz started an independent line of questioning, about eyeglasses, that had not been introduced by either the prosecution or the defense: Did David Packer wear them? Did he have them on the night he saw Sweeney standing over Dominique’s body? The questions advanced nothing and muddied what had gone before.

A photographer from People magazine appeared in court one day, weighed down with equipment. I happened to know him. He said he had been sent to take pictures of our family for an article his magazine was doing on the trial. Neither Griffin nor Alex wished to be photographed, but the photographer stayed in the courtroom and took pictures of the session with Sweeney and the lawyers. At the lunch break the judge signaled to the photographer to see him in his chambers. Later, out in the parking lot, I ran into the man. He told me he had thought the judge was going to ask him not to shoot during the session. Instead, the judge had said he wanted his eyes to show up in the pictures and had tried on several different pairs of glasses for the photographer’s approval.

Adelson had never intended to have Sweeney take the stand. However, when he had to throw out his psychiatric defense to keep the jurors from knowing about Sweeney’s previous acts of violence against Lillian Pierce, he had no choice but to put the accused on. Sweeney was abjectly courteous, addressing the lawyers and judge as sir. He spoke very quietly, and often had to be told to raise his voice so that the jurors could hear. Although he wept, he never once became flustered, and there was no sign of the rage he exhibited on the day Lillian Pierce took the stand. He painted his relationship with Dominique as nearly idyllic. He gave the names of all her animals—the bunny, the kitten, the puppy. He refuted the testimony of Bryan Cook and Denise Dennehy and denied that he had attempted to choke Dominique after their night on the town five weeks before the murder. He said he’d only tried to restrain her from leaving the house. He admitted they had separated after that, and that she had had the locks changed so that he could not get back in the house, but he insisted that she had promised to reconcile with him and that her refusal to do so was what brought on the final attack. He could not, he claimed, remember the events of the murder, which prompted Barshop to accuse him of having “selective memory.” After the attack, Sweeney said, he had entered the house and attempted to commit suicide by swallowing two bottles of pills; however, no bottles were ever found, and if he had swallowed pills, they did not have any apparent effect on his system. From the beginning we had been warned that the defense would slander Dominique. It is part of the defense premise that the victim is responsible for the crime. As Dr. Willard Gaylin says in his book The Killing of Bonnie Garland, Bonnie Garland’s killer, Richard Herrin, murdered Bonnie all over again in the courtroom. It is always the murder victim who is placed on trial. John Sweeney, who claimed to love Dominique, and whose defense was that this was a crime of passion, slandered her in court as viciously and cruelly as he had strangled her. It was agonizing for us to listen to him, led on by Adelson, besmirch Dominique’s name. His violent past remained sacrosanct and inviolate, but her name was allowed to be trampled upon and kicked, with unsubstantiated charges, by the man who killed her. “Look at her friends!” I wanted to scream at the judge and jury. “You have seen them both on the stand and in the courtroom: Bryan Cook, Denise Dennehy, Melinda Bittan, Kit McDonough, Erica Elliot, and the others who have been here every day—bright, clean-cut, successful young people. That is what Dominique Dunne was like. She wasn’t at all the person whom John Sweeney is describing.” But I sat silent.

When Dominique’s friends closed up her house after the funeral, her best friend, Melinda Bittan, came across a letter Dominique had written to Sweeney, which he may or may not have received. The letter had been filed away and forgotten. In the final days of the trial, Melinda remembered it one day when a group of us were having lunch together. Steven Barshop introduced it in his rebuttal, and as the court reporter, Sally Yerger, read it to the jury, it was as if Dominique was speaking from beyond the grave. “Selfishness works both ways,” she wrote. “You are just as selfish as I am. We have to be two individuals to work together as a couple. I am not permitted to do enough things on my own. Why must you be a part of everything I do? Why do you want to come to my riding lessons and my acting classes? Why are you jealous of every scene partner I have? “Why must I recount word for word everything I spoke to Dr. Black about? Why must I talk about every audition when you know it is bad luck for me? Why do we have discussions at 3 a.m. all the time, instead of during the day? “Why must you know the name of every person I come into contact with? You go crazy over my rehearsals. You insist on going to work with me when I have told you it makes me nervous. Your paranoia is overboard.… You do not love me. You are obsessed with me. The person you think you love is not me at all. It is someone you have made up in your head. I’m the person who makes you angry, who you fight with sometimes. I think we only fight when images of me fade away and you are faced with the real me. That’s why arguments erupt out of nowhere. “The whole thing has made me realize how scared I am of you, and I don’t mean just physically. I’m afraid of the next time you are going to have another mood swing.… When we are good, we are great. But when we are bad, we are horrendous. The bad outweighs the good.”

Throughout Steven Barshop’s closing argument to the jury, when he asked them to find Sweeney guilty of murder in the second degree, the maximum verdict available to them, Judge Katz sat with a bottle of correction fluid, brushing out lines on something he was preparing. Later we learned it was his instructions to the jury. I thought, if he isn’t listening, or is only half listening, what kind of subliminal signal is that sending to the jury? During Adelson’s final argument, on the other hand, he gave his full attention.

‘This will be the toughest day of the trial,” said Steven Barshop on the morning of Adelson’s final argument. “Today you will hear Adelson justify murder.” We had grown very close to Steven Barshop during the weeks of the trial and admired his integrity and honesty. “You don’t have to sit through it, you know,” he said. But we did, and he knew we would. I lost count of how many times Adelson described Sweeney to the jury as an “ordinarily reasonable person,” as if this act of murder were an isolated instance in an ordinarily serene life. Every time he said it he separated the three words—ordinarily reasonable person—and underscored them with a pointing gesture of his hand. We who had seen every moment of the trial knew of thirteen separate instances of violence, ten against Lillian Pierce and three against Dominique, but the jurors at this point were still not even aware of the existence of Lillian Pierce. Through an informant at Ma Maison, our family also knew of other acts of violence against women that had not been introduced into the case, but we sat in impassive silence as Adelson described the strangler again and again as an ordinarily reasonable person. He returned to his old theme: “This was not a crime,” he told the jury. “This was a tragedy.” It didn’t matter that he knew it wasn’t true. They didn’t know it wasn’t true, and he was only concerned with convincing them. He talked about “that old-fashioned thing: romantic love.” He made up dialogue and put it in the mouth of Dominique Dunne. “I, Dominique, reject you Sweeney,” he cried out. “I lied to you Sweeney!” We were sickened at his shamelessness. Leaving the courtroom during a break, I found myself next to him in the aisle. “You piece of shit,” I said to him quietly so that only he could hear. His eyes flashed in anger. “Your honor!” he called out. “May I approach the bench?” I continued out the corridor, where I told Lenny what I had done. “That was very stupid,” she said. “Now you’ll get kicked out of the courtroom.” “No one heard me say it except Adelson,” I said. “When the judge calls me up, I’ll lie and say I didn’t say it. Everybody else is lying. Why shouldn’t I? It’s his word against mine.” Steve Barshop appeared. “Is he going to kick me out?” I asked. Barshop smiled. “He can’t kick the father of the victim out of court on the last day of the trial with all the press present,” he said. Then he added, “But don’t do it again.”

Judge Katz drank soft drinks from Styrofoam cups as he read instructions to the jury explaining second-degree murder, voluntary manslaughter, and involuntary manslaughter. Later, after the sentencing, the jury foreman, Paul Spiegel, would say on television that the judge’s instructions were incomprehensible. During the eight days that the jury was out, dead-locked, they asked the judge four times for clarification of the instructions, and four times the judge told them that the answers to their questions were in the instructions.

I was now living in the Bel Air home of Martin Manulis, who had returned east after Katie’s death to complete post-production work on a new miniseries. The jury had been out for over a week, and we knew they could not understand the instructions. Lenny, Griffin, Alex, and I were terribly edgy, and one evening we all went our separate ways. I paced restlessly from room to room in the Manulis house. I hadn’t looked at television that summer except occasionally to see the news, but I suddenly picked up the remote-control unit and flicked the set on. I froze at the voice I heard. There, on television, was Dominique screaming, “What’s happening?” I had not known that Poltergeist was scheduled on the cable channel, and the shock of seeing her was overwhelming. I felt as if she were sending me a message. “I don’t know what’s happening, my darling,” I screamed back at the television set, and for the first time since the trial started I sobbed. The next day the verdict came in.

The waiting was endless. Joseph Shapiro, the Ma Maison lawyer, regaled the reporters with an account of an African safari in the veldt where the native guides serving his party wore black tie. One of the courthouse groupies said that three buzzes to the clerk’s desk meant that a verdict had been reached. Five minutes before the jury entered, we watched Judge Katz sentence a man who had robbed a flower shop in a nonviolent crime to five years in prison. Sweeney entered, clutching his Bible, and sat a few feet away from us. Mrs. Sweeney sat across the aisle with Joseph Shapiro. The room was packed. A pool television camera, reporters, and photographers filled the aisles. The jury entered, and the foreman, Paul Spiegel, delivered two envelopes to the bailiff to give to the judge. Katz opened first one envelope and then the other, milking his moment before the television camera like a starlet at the Golden Globes. Then, revealing nothing, he handed the two envelopes to his clerk, Velma Smith, who read the verdicts aloud to the court. The strangulation death of Dominique Dunne was voluntary manslaughter, and the earlier choking a misdemeanor assault. There was a gasp of disbelief in the courtroom. The maximum sentence for the two charges is six and a half years, and with good time and work time, the convict is paroled automatically when he has served half his sentence, without having to go through a parole hearing. Since the time spent in jail between the arrest and the sentencing counted as time served, Sweeney would be free in two and a half years. “I am ecstatic!” cried Adelson. He embraced Sweeney, who laid his head on Adelson’s shoulder. Shapiro clutched Mrs. Sweeney’s hand in a victorious salute, but Mrs. Sweeney, of the lot of them, had the grace not to exult publicly that her son had got away with murder. Then Adelson and Shapiro clasped hands, acting as if they had freed an innocent man from the gallows. Not content with his victory, Adelson wanted more. “Probation!” he cried. As we sat there like whipped dogs and watched the spectacle of justice at work, I felt a madness growing within me. Judge Katz excused the jury, telling them that even though other people might agree or disagree with the verdict, they must not doubt their decision. “You were there. You saw the evidence. You heard the witnesses.” He knew, of course, that they would be hearing from the press about Lillian Pierce in minutes. He told them that justice had been served and thanked them on behalf of the attorneys and both families. I could not believe I had heard Judge Katz thank the jury on behalf of my family for reducing the murder of my daughter to manslaughter. Rage heated my blood. I felt loathing for him. The weeks of sitting impassively through the travesty that we had witnessed finally took their toll. “Not for our family, Judge Katz!” I shouted. Friends behind me put warning hands of caution on my shoulders, but reason had deserted me. Katz looked at me, aghast, as if he were above criticism in his own courtroom. “You will have your chance to speak at the time of the sentencing, Mr. Dunne,” he said. “It’s too late then,” I answered. “I will have to ask the bailiff to remove you from the courtroom,” he said. “No,” I answered. “I’m leaving the courtroom. It’s all over here.” I took Lenny’s wheelchair and pushed it up the aisle. The room was silent. At the double doors that opened onto the corridor, I turned back. My eyes locked with Judge Katz’s and I raised my hand and pointed at him. “You have withheld important evidence from this jury about this man’s history of violence against women.” The jury foreman, when asked later by the press what finally broke the deadlock, replied on television, “A few jurors were just hot and tired and wanted to give up.” The trial was over. Sentencing was set for November 10.

There was an uproar in the media over the verdict, and KABC radio ran an on-the-hour editorial blasting it. Letters of outrage filled the newspapers as stories of John Sweeney’s history of violence against women became public knowledge. The Herald Examiner published a front-page article about the case: “Heat of Passion: Legitimate Defense or a Legal Loophole?” Judge Katz was severely criticized. In the weeks that followed, a local television station released the results of a poll of prosecutors and criminal defense lawyers in which he tied for fourth-worst judge in Los Angeles County.

Several days after the verdict I returned to the courthouse to retrieve from the district attorney the photographs and letters and videotapes of television shows that Lenny had lent him. The receptionist said I would find Steve Barshop in one of the courtrooms. As I passed Courtroom D, out of habit I looked in the window. At that instant Judge Katz happened to look up. I moved on and entered Courtroom C, where Barshop was busy with another lawyer. The doors of the courtroom opened behind me, and Judge Katz’s bailiff, Paul Turner, who had wrestled Sweeney to the ground several months earlier, asked me to go out into the hall with him. “What are you doing here?” he asked me. He was stern and tough. “What do you mean, what am I doing here?” I replied. “Just what I said to you.” “I don’t have the right to be here?” “There’s been a lot of bad blood in this trial,” he said. I realized that he thought, or the judge thought, that I had come there to seek revenge. Then Steve Barshop came out into the corridor, and the bailiff turned and left us.

In the month between the verdict and the sentencing, we tried to pick up the pieces of our lives, but the aftermath of the trial continued. Joseph Shapiro appeared at the wrap party given by 20th Century-Fox for the film Johnny Dangerously, in which Griffin co-stars, and the producers asked him to leave the lot. According to Proposition 8, the victim’s bill of rights, the next of kin of murder victims have the right to take the stand at the sentencing and plead with the judge for the maximum sentence. We were told that Adelson intended to cross-examine us if we did this. We were also told that Adelson, in order to get Sweeney released on probation that day, intended to put on the stand psychiatrists and psychologists who would testify that Sweeney was nonviolent. And we were told that Adelson intended to show a videotape of Sweeney under hypnosis saying he could not remember the murder.

On the day of the sentencing, pickets protesting the verdict, the judge, and Ma Maison marched and sang on the courthouse steps in Santa Monica. Courtroom D was filled to capacity. Extra bailiffs stood in the aisles and among the standees at the rear of the room. A young man called Gavin DeBecker sat next to the bailiff’s desk and made frequent trips back to the judge’s chambers. DeBecker provides bodyguard service for political figures and public personalities. Throughout the several hours of the proceedings John Sweeney remained hunched over, his face covered by his hands, so unobtrusive a figure that he seemed almost not to be there. Two of Sweeney’s sisters took the stand and asked for mercy for their brother. Mrs. Sweeney described her life as a battered and beaten wife. Griffin took the stand and presented Judge Katz with a petition that had been circulated by Dominique’s friends; it contained a thousand signatures of people protesting the verdict and asking for the maximum sentence. Lenny spoke, and I spoke. We were not cross-examined by Adelson. No psychiatrists or psychologists took the stand. No videotape of Sweeney saying he could not remember the murder was shown. But a whole new dynamic entered Courtroom D that day and dominated everything else: the outrage of Judge Burton S. Katz over the injustice of the verdict arrived at by the jury. He mocked the argument that Sweeney had acted in the heat of passion. “I will state on the record that I believe this is a murder. I believe that Sweeney is a murderer and not a manslaughterer.… This is a killing with malice. This man held on to this young, vulnerable, beautiful, warm human being that had everything to live for, with his hands. He had to have known that as she was flailing to get oxygen, that the process of death was displacing the process of life.” Judge Katz then addressed Sweeney: “You knew of your capacity for uncontrolled violence. You knew you hurt Dominique badly with your own hands and that you nearly choked her into unconsciousness on September 26. You were in a rage because your fragile ego could not accept the final rejection.” He said he was appalled by the jurors’ decision over Sweeney’s first attack: “The jury came back—I don’t understand for the life of me—with simple assault, thus taking away the sentencing parameters that I might have on a felony assault.” He called the punishment for the crime “anemic and pathetically inadequate.” Having got the verdict we felt he had guided the jurors into giving, he was now blasting them for giving it. He went on and on. It was as if he had suddenly become a different human being. However, all his eloquence changed nothing. The verdict remained the same: manslaughter. The sentence remained the same: six and a half years, automatically out in two and a half. Surrounded by four bailiffs, Sweeney rose, looking at no one, and walked out of the courtroom for the last time. He was sent to the minimum-security facility at Chino.

Gavin DeBecker pursued us down the hall. He said Judge Katz would like to see me in his chambers. Lenny declined, but I was curious, as was Griffin. DeBecker led us to Katz’s chambers. “Burt,” he said, tapping on the door, “the Dunnes are here.” Judge Katz was utterly charming. He called us by our first names. He talked at length about the injustice of the verdict and his own shock over it, as if all this were something in which he had played no part. He said his daughters had not spoken to him since the verdict came in. He gave each of us his Superior Court card and wrote on it his unlisted telephone number at home and his private number in the chambers so that we could call him direct. What, I thought to myself, would I ever have to call him about? Back in the crowded corridor again, I was talking with friends as Michael Adelson made his exit. He caught my eye, and I sensed what he was going to do. In the manner of John McEnroe leaping over the net in a moment of largesse to exchange pleasantries with the vanquished, this defender of my daughter’s killer made his way across the corridor to speak to me. I waited until he was very near, and as he was about to extend his hand I turned away from him.

When Michael Adelson was asked in an NBC television interview if he thought Sweeney would pose a threat to society when released from prison in two and a half years, he pondered and replied, “I think he will be safe if he gets the therapy he needs. His rage needs to be worked upon.” Judge Katz, when asked the same question by the same interviewer, answered, “I wouldn’t be comfortable with him in society.” Steven Barshop told a newspaper reporter, “He’ll be out in time to cook someone a nice dinner and kill someone else.” Paul Spiegel, the jury foreman, in a television interview, called the judge’s criticism of the verdict a cheap shot. He said the judge was concerned over the criticism he himself had received since the trial and was trying to place the blame elsewhere. Spiegel said he felt that justice had not been served. He said the jury would certainly have found Sweeney guilty if they had heard all the evidence. “If it were up to me,” he said, “Sweeney would have spent the rest of his life in jail.” Not one of us regrets having gone through the trial, or wishes that we had accepted a plea bargain, even though Sweeney would then have had to serve seven and a half years rather than two and a half. We chose to go to trial, and we did, and we saw into one another’s souls in the process. We loved her, and we knew that she loved us back. Knowing that we did everything we could has been for us the beginning of the release from pain. We thought of revenge, the boys and I, but it was just a thought, no more than that, momentarily comforting. We believe in God and in ultimate justice, and the time came to let go of our obsession with the murder and proceed with life. Alex decided to stay with his mother in California and finish his college education. Griffin had to return to New York to start a new film. Lenny became an active spokesperson for Parents of Murdered Children. I returned to the novel I was writing, which I had put aside at the beginning of the trial.