Money, Murder, and Dominick Dunne: A Life in Several Acts

by Robert Hofler

  Covering the Menendez trial, her first big murder case, Maghame focused on the motions being filed, what the various legal terms meant, who said what on the stand. But she learned something else from observing Dominick. She saw how he quickly made friends with court apparatchiks like Patti Jo Fairbanks, the senior legal assistant for the district attorney’s office. “He had a connection with people, and an amazing caring, and then people opened up to him. Even the bailiffs were attracted to him. They felt he was genuinely interested in their story,” Maghame said. “I was so invested in ‘what are the lawyers doing?’ That’s important, but understanding that the people involved are affected, especially in a murder trial, I learned that from Dominick.”

  He made it clear to Maghame his feelings on the case. “Dominick thought the dad was a son of a bitch, an asshole, that Lyle was the ringmaster sociopath, that they went back and reloaded to kill the mother. That bothered Dominick,” said Maghame.

  Erik and Lyle killing their father was one thing. “But why the mother?” Dominick kept asking. “She was a victim. Why did they have to kill her? There was no threat from her.”

  Lyle testified that his father had repeatedly raped him, and his mother had, on occasion, inspected his testicles and put clamps on them. It was this testimony that, surprisingly, most affected Dominick.

  “When Lyle testified, it was really compelling,” said Maghame. After Lyle’s first day on the stand, Dominick immediately turned to her to say, “I wonder if I’m wrong. Could I be wrong?” In the hallway outside the courtroom, he repeated his doubts to fellow reporter Robert Rand. Since Dominick and Rand would be appearing that evening on TV to discuss the week’s events in the Menendez trial, they did not pursue an in-depth conversation then and there. Rand, however, was stunned when two hours later on Court TV’s “Prime Time Justice” Dominick told moderator Terry Moran, “I didn’t believe one word [Lyle] was saying from the stand this afternoon.”

  Rand entertained a momentary thought of “busting him right there about our conversation, but decided it would be completely unprofessional.” Off-camera, Rand later asked Dominick about his abrupt change of heart. “Well, I had a moment where I thought it might have sounded true,” he replied. “Then I thought it wasn’t true at all.”

  “Dominick went back to his default position,” said Rand. “I was somewhat surprised but not shocked that he was maintaining his ‘brand’ when we were both interviewed live on Court TV.”

  Ira Reiner held the office of L.A. district attorney during the Menendez trial and engaged in several conversations with Dominick about the case. “I don’t recall him talking about having any doubts,” said Reiner. “Dominick’s view is that Leslie Abramson totally fabricated the imperfect self-defense theory. It was his point of view that this is not something the kids came up with and that she fed it to them. With the imperfect self-defense, you have to carefully [put together] the facts like pieces of a puzzle. He felt it would take a lot of spoon feeding to get them to testify right to stay within the lines of that defense.”

  For his Vanity Fair coverage, Dominick wrote about Lyle being a “great neurotic actor,” in the mold of Marilyn Monroe and Judy Garland. He also observed that Lyle appeared to bask in the response he got from the courtroom, and his pride was compounded later in the trial when Erik’s testimony appeared to be much less effective with the jurors.

  Dominick would admit to identifying with the Menendez sons in one very significant way: he had also been verbally abused and physically beaten by his father. “But I didn’t kill [my father],” he said. “I went away to college. I went away to my life.” A connection that Dominick refused to make, at least publicly, was what troubled him most about being an abused child. No one in his family, including his mother, ever acknowledged the mistreatment he had suffered despite there being welts on his thighs and buttocks. In one childhood altercation, according to Dominick, his father struck him on the head so severely that his ear swelled, causing him to be hard of hearing for the remainder of his life.

  Erik and Lyle Menendez also charged, in addition to the sexual abuse, that their father had stuck needles and tacks into their buttocks. After he heard those accusations in court, Dominick went back to his suite at the Chateau Marmont and stuck a tack in his buttock to see what kind of a mark it left. He reported in Vanity Fair that it drew blood and left a major red spot. He wondered why no one ever noticed such scars on the Menendez sons’ bodies. Never in print, or in interviews, did Dominick wonder why no one ever noticed evidence of abuse on his own body when he was a child.

  Shoreen Maghame, as a reporter, talked to Erik Menendez on the phone several times during the course of the trial. For obvious reasons, Leslie Abramson did not extend that phone privilege to Dominick, who circumvented the attorney by turning Maghame into one of his sources on the subject of the defendant. They discussed his supposition that Erik was a homosexual. “We debated it,” said Maghame. “How could they [commit the murders] without something horrible happening [to Erik and Lyle]? I was much more naïve then.”

  For his secondhand access to Lyle Menendez, Dominick groomed another source, not a reporter but someone who nonetheless spoke on the phone regularly with the older brother. Norma Novelli owned a cleaning service called Grime Busters in the San Fernando Valley. She also self-published a magazine titled Mind’s Eye, which devoted a page to prisoners who wanted to contribute to “find if they have artistic abilities.” Novelli sent the magazine to various jails around the country. “And Lyle answered,” she recalled. Their correspondence began with his asking for dimes to make phone calls from prison. “And it started from there,” she said. “After that, I had to get permission from the judge to let Lyle listen to all the commentary said about him from the trial.” After the court finished each day, Novelli would place a phone receiver alongside her TV set, making it possible for Lyle to hear what people said about him on Court TV.

  Novelli’s conversations with Lyle were “just casual stuff,” she noted. Lyle, however, expressed keen interest in one well-known journalist covering the trial. He often asked Novelli, “What did Dominick say today?” Or, “Did you see Dominick at lunch today?” Even though Dominick rarely missed an opportunity in Vanity Fair or on Court TV to call the two Menendez sons pathological liars, Lyle never developed a negative attitude toward his chief accuser in the press, and instead enjoyed the impassioned coverage.

  Lyle also found a skeptic in Norma Novelli, despite their many conversations. She agreed with Dominick on the issue of sexual abuse. “We joked a lot about the trial,” said Novelli. “The silly things people said, and the way Lyle cried on the stand. We both laughed. Nobody that age would act that way.” She did not believe that two adult sons would kill their parents due to sexual abuse. “They just would have left home. Kids can’t wait to get away from home,” she surmised. Novelli looked elsewhere for their motives in murder. “Lyle wanted the money now.”

  Dominick did exhaustive interviews and research on the Menendez trial, enough to fill four long articles for Vanity Fair. Where the cover story on Claus von Bülow showed his remarkable understanding of a rarefied world of wealth and position, Dominick’s articles on the Menendez trial gave full display to his talent for winning the confidence of star witnesses.

  During the trial, Craig Cignarelli became known as the Snitch. Leslie Abramson also called him the Prick when she saw him in the hallways of the courthouse. Dominick, for his part, thought of him as the Conscience. Although it was rumored that Cignarelli sought out the police, he did not initiate the contact. They came to him, and after much deliberation, Cignarelli decided to tell the authorities what he knew about his best friend.

  Cignarelli and Erik were in the same class at Calabasas High School and would have graduated together if not for the fact that Erik and Lyle went on a robbery spree, stealing more than $100,000 worth of possessions from homes in Calabasas, an upper-middle-class town inland from Malibu, California. Since he was underage, Erik took the rap,
making it possible for Lyle to attend the Ivy League school of his father’s dreams, Princeton University. As part of their probation, however, both boys were required to see a therapist. Embarrassed by his sons’ crimes, Jose Menendez moved the family to Beverly Hills and into the house where he and his wife would be murdered. Before the Menendez family left Calabasas, Cignarelli and Erik cowrote several screenplays, all of them murder mysteries. In one of those screenplays, titled Friends, a son murders his parents in the opening scene. Two weeks before the Menendez sons shot their parents, Erik rewrote the Friends script without Cignarelli’s participation; tellingly, Erik’s handwritten notations in the margins of the document presage the extreme carnage to come.

  Shortly after the murders, Erik confessed the crime to his best friend, and it was this conversation that Cignarelli repeated to the police. Wanting a taped confession, the police then wired Cignarelli for a meeting with Erik at a Malibu restaurant overlooking the Pacific Ocean. Their talk at Gladstone’s did not go as planned. Instead of confessing a second time, Erik said he never should have told such a story.

  Dominick admired Cignarelli, especially when he overheard Leslie Abramson call him “that fucking prick” in the courthouse hallway. “She would do anything to intimidate me,” said Cignarelli, and that was before he took the stand.

  For Vanity Fair, Dominick wrote about Erik Menendez’s best friend fleetingly and not in detail. He mentioned speaking to Cignarelli only once, as if in passing outside the courtroom. Dominick asked him, “Did you know that Lyle wore a toupee?” Cignarelli answered yes. According to Dominick’s reporting, that short exchange was the extent of their talk.

  Dominick joked with friends that the most fascinating aspect of the case for him was Lyle’s toupee. After getting rid of his own mini-rug in the late 1970s, Dominick continued to fixate on other men’s fake hair, and in the case of Lyle’s full hairpiece, it was not irrelevant to the two sons’ defense. According to their testimony, Jose Menendez hit Lyle so hard one day over breakfast that the boy’s toupee fell off, causing immense embarrassment to the teenager. In his court testimony, Erik claimed he had no idea of the rug’s existence. Even in affluent Calabasas, it is very unusual for a fifteen-year-old to be wearing a toupee.

  Which is why Dominick asked Cignarelli if he knew about the rug. When Erik’s best friend told him yes, Dominick knew the two Menendez boys were lying. However, that one impromptu interview to discuss Lyle’s premature hairpiece did not end their talks.

  On occasion, the two men met at Dominick’s suite at the Chateau Marmont. Dominick initially told Cignarelli, “Let’s just talk as friends.” And according to Cignarelli, Dominick became a good friend. “He definitely was kind of a soft shoulder during the trial, he was someone I could speak to, and nothing would be taken out of context,” said Cignarelli. He found “some consistencies between Capote and Dominick in the way they wrote about trials. Nick was empathizing with my plight,” he said. Dominick warned the young man that Leslie Abramson would be “aggressive and hostile” to him on the stand. Cignarelli liked that Dominick referred to Abramson as “the bitch” and “he let her know he wasn’t scared of her. Leslie would yell at anyone. Nick just had a way of giving her a glance.”

  And Dominick was right about Abramson. She proved aggressive and hostile in her questioning. She even badgered Cignarelli for wearing a suit and tie in court, as if he were grandstanding by being well dressed. However, the “most intimidating moment had nothing to do with Abramson,” said Cignarelli, “but rather with seeing my best friend ten feet away and knowing that my words could put him in the gas chamber.”

  Dominick did not coach Cignarelli for his big day in court. Instead, he told him, “I respect what you’re doing. You’re doing the right thing and it is a difficult time and it’s a difficult experience.”

  Other than those words, they did not talk about the trial per se. “He wanted to know about my friendship with Erik,” said Cignarelli. “He wanted to know details: how I came to make the decision to turn Erik in. He treated me as a friend. He spoke about a man’s place in the world and morality and justice, and that even in the face of a great trial it will serve you later on. Society said I was betraying a friend. Nick said I was a better man. He had a great way of finding the pulse to speak to you. It was a time of need for me, and he was a quiet rock that wanted information but did it in a way that was supportive and nurturing.”

  Judalon Smyth was another star witness whom Dominick turned into an instant confidante. It was Smyth, the erstwhile mistress of Dr. L. Jerome Oziel, who knew of the therapist’s tapes in which Erik and Lyle confessed to the murders. By the time the police questioned Smyth, she had already begun to fear for her life, and friends advised her to tell a third party everything she knew about the Menendez brothers. “As protection,” she explained. Mutual friends arranged for her and Dominick to meet. “They told me he was the best person to speak with.”

  The two immediately hit it off. She thought her life was in danger because of the stories she had to tell. Dominick identified; he thought he was going to be outed as a gay man for the stories he had to tell about the Menendez case. He shared those fears with Smyth, and they bonded.

  Smyth’s own personal story fascinated Dominick. “My relationship with my mother had never been good but it was on stable ground,” she said. “When Oziel came into my life, every conversation turned into a battle with my mother. I became suspicious of her. You wouldn’t think I’d become such a little puppet, but I did.”

  Dominick wondered if Dr. Oziel had also exacerbated Erik and Lyle’s relationship with their parents. “Judalon, you’ve got to tell your story,” Dominick insisted. He even paid her the ultimate compliment after reading a few chapters of her proposed memoir: “You’re a better writer than I am!”

  Dominick put Smyth in touch with his agent, Owen Laster. “Dominick wanted me to write my book and tell my story, to get it out there right away,” she recalled. Smyth’s lawyer, however, adamantly disagreed, telling her, “That will just cut your credibility [on the stand] down to zero.”

  As would be the case with so many troubled witnesses to come, Dominick more than interviewed Smyth; he embraced her emotionally. “Dominick and I became really good friends, and he became friends with my other friends, not just the mutual friends we already had in common,” said Smyth.

  Their friendship went beyond a few conversations. Smyth and Dominick watched Oziel’s testimony on the stand from his suite at the Chateau Marmont. She let him listen to tapes she had “inadvertently” taped with Oziel from a self-activating answering machine. Smyth even defended Dominick in the face of Leslie Abramson’s considerable wrath.

  “Stop it right now!” she scolded the attorney after one verbal attack on her friend. “Dominick is one of the most decent, wonderful human beings I know. If you’re going to say something bad, I’ll never talk to you again.”

  Abramson backed away. She never made another negative comment about Dominick, at least not in front of Judalon Smyth.

  Dr. Oziel’s ex-girlfriend quickly emerged as one of the trial’s more controversial witnesses. Smyth’s initial testimony regarding the existence of the therapist’s taped conversations with the Menendez brothers had been key to the prosecution’s case. But during the trial, it was the defense that tried to use her to discredit Oziel, a major but reluctant witness for the prosecution. Smyth later recanted some of her early testimony, saying Oziel had “implanted” in her mind “things that didn’t exist.” Dominick would write in his private journal that, in the beginning, he saw Smyth as “the heroine of this story” but later developed serious doubts about her, doubts that never made their way into his reporting for Vanity Fair.

  Getting an in-depth interview with Philip Kearney was not the coup of a Judalon Smyth or a Craig Cignarelli. In fact, among the reporters, only Dominick thought to talk to the photographer, and it showed his ingenuity at uncovering colorful but salient details.

  Kearney never tes
tified in court but almost made the witness list due to some photographs he took of Erik Menendez long before the murders were committed. Those portraits suggested a possible physical, if not romantic, relationship between the two men. Judge Weisberg found those photos inadmissible, ruling Erik’s sexual orientation irrelevant to the case.

  Dominick found the photos anything but. For his article “Menendez Justice,” he insisted that the Vanity Fair photo department pay top dollar to reprint one shirtless photo of Erik, shot by Kearney. Dominick considered the photo a crucial piece of evidence, because he thought it proved Erik had lied and he might also be homosexual, a supposition that Abramson fought to keep out of court.

  Like Judalon Smyth and Craig Cignarelli before him, Kearney found a friend in Dominick, even though all their conversations were conducted long distance on the phone. Dominick respected what these people said in confidence, and he wrote much, much less than what any of them revealed to him in private.

  Dominick asked Kearney point blank if he had had an intimate relationship with Erik. In Vanity Fair, Dominick recorded Kearney’s response as being “Spiritually, yes. Physically, almost.”

  Nearly a decade and a half after that interview with Dominick, Kearney said the relationship was actually “more physical than it was spiritual. I’d give Erik a massage and it would lead to other things.” When Dominick and Kearney spoke, the year was 1993. The photographer was living in conservative New Orleans, “and I had relatives who didn’t want to read about me and my life that way for the first time. Dominick respected that.”

  Kearney first met Erik Menendez in 1987 on a street in Beverly Hills, where he was photographing a model. “It was just a test shoot, and Erik was walking home from school,” said Kearney. He remembered the teenager as being a good-looking, “not great-looking,” guy who wore blue jeans and an unbuttoned denim shirt. Erik watched Kearney take pictures for a few minutes, and when the female model took a break to change her outfit, he struck up a conversation with the photographer who had just begun his career behind the camera. “We formed a friendship. Erik would come to visit and we got close and there was some physical interaction; it didn’t get too particularly heavy,” Kearney recalled. Erik, at that time, spoke highly of his father and how Jose Menendez wanted to be the first Cuban-born senator.