The wire fox terriers had already tracked through her blood when the police arrived at Susan Berman’s bungalow in Los Angeles on Christmas Eve 16 years ago to find her dead, shot in the back of the head, execution-style.

Her friends would tell investigators that Ms. Berman, a down-on-her-luck screenwriter and journalist, would never have let her three dogs run free, for fear they would be hit by a car speeding down narrow Benedict Canyon. Nor would she have opened the door to a stranger, but the police found the back door open and the front unlocked.

Suspicion passed from her landlady, with whom she had been feuding, to her manager and even to geriatric gangsters from Las Vegas who might have known her mobster father back in the days of Bugsy Siegel.

But eventually investigators focused on a wealthy man from a powerful New York real estate family whom she had met in college during the 1960s and for the rest of her life regarded as a brother and a kindred spirit. Robert A. Durst.