Conviction

by Leonard Levitt

  Then, in 1982, Dominick suffered the personal tragedy that was to launch his writing career. His daughter Dominique, an actress, was murdered by her boyfriend. Dominick’s first Vanity Fair article, “A Father’s Account of the Trial of His Daughter’s Killer,” in March 1984, described how the boyfriend pleaded temporary insanity, then walked virtually scot-free from a Los Angeles courtroom.

  Since then, he’d covered trials of the rich and powerful and become a celebrity himself. My friend Cotter at the Post had met him in Newport, Rhode Island, at the trial of Claus Von Bulow, who was accused of poisoning his comatose wife Sunny. Cotter told me how helpful Dominick was to reporters with daily deadlines. Cotter referred to him as “Nick.”

  Since that news conference at Greenwich police headquarters, he and I had become friendly. He professed to admire my work and, after my first article, called from time to time. When his novel about Martha’s murder, A Season in Purgatory, was published in 1993, I tagged along to his book signing in Greenwich, hoping to meet some of his upper-class connections who might help solve the case. Alas, none materialized.

  I assumed that Dominick’s friendliness stemmed from this: While all investigative reporters I know want to become best-selling novelists, Dominick was the only best-selling novelist I knew who wanted to become an investigative reporter.

  But as events revealed, my career as an investigative reporter and his as a novelist would prove mutually exclusive. An investigative reporter is concerned first with accuracy. If a fact is incorrect, his entire work is diminished. If he does his job properly, he remains faceless and invisible.

  A novelist paints on a wider canvas. He can omit, alter, or even make up facts. Sometimes, as Dominick did in the Moxley case, he can write himself into the story.

  Perhaps because he had been rendered powerless in the murder of his daughter, I think Dominick came to see himself as a Lone Ranger—like figure, an avenger righting wrongs, helping victims like Dorthy, who were unable to help themselves. In fact, I thought he seemed like me.

  Before I called him, as Dorthy had asked me to do to follow up on the Sutton report hint that he had dropped, I telephoned Jim Murphy to learn how Dominick had obtained his report. Murphy blamed a twenty-one-year-old employee, Jamie Bryan, the son of a family friend Murphy had hired to write it. Then, I called Dominick.

  But as I described to him Dorthy’s call to me and mine to Murphy, Dominick dispelled any inkling that we were kindred investigative spirits. He cut short our conversation. He did not speak to me again for two years.

  Some months later, he responded to a phone message I’d left for him by sending me a fax at my office at Police Plaza in New York, mistakenly accusing me of unmasking Bryan as his source: “After you heard from Dorthy Moxley that I had a copy of the Sutton Report, you called your friend at Sutton Associates to tell him that a young man working for him had given a copy of the report to me. The young man had performed a decent act and your call to his boss put him into a state of abject fear for which I felt a responsibility. I knew then I would never give the report to you.”

  Dominick did provide a copy of the Sutton report to Frank. But when Frank showed no interest in it, having been apprised of much of its contents by me, Dominick was no kinder to him. As his fax to me continued, “In time I gave a copy to Frank Garr…. That was a total waste of time. I really regretted having given the report to Frank.”

  Dominick also claimed, incorrectly as far as I knew, that Frank was planning to write a book. “Only my innate good manners,” Dominick’s fax continued, “kept me from saying. ‘On what? On how you couldn’t solve the case for over twenty years?’ Or maybe he was planning on using the Sutton report as his plot. Over and out with Frank.”

  I was stunned. I was so angry with Dominick, I called Frank in Bridgeport. “You’ve got to see this,” I said.

  “Read it to me,” he said.

  “No, you’ve got to see it to get the full flavor.”

  That night I drove over to Frank’s house. “Here,” I said, throwing it on his kitchen table. “Read it and weep.”

  Frank said nothing for a few moments as he scanned the fax. Then he shook his head and looked up. “Writers,” he said, staring at me an extra second, I thought. “They’re all the same.”

  For a moment I was taken aback. Frank was being his wise-ass self but I wasn’t amused. Perhaps because I was so pissed at Dominick, I didn’t feel like being included as the butt of one of his flippant remarks.

  “Where did he get the idea you were writing a book?” I asked. “I didn’t know you were a writer, too.” I, also, could be a wise-ass.

  “I have no idea,” Frank replied. I think he realized how upset I was, although I wasn’t sure he knew whether it was more at him or at Dominick. At that moment, I wasn’t so sure myself.

  “I remember telling Dominick,” Frank continued, “that Dorthy suggested I write a book. But I told her my job is solving this case.”

  Then Frank told me how years before, at Dorthy’s urging, he had met with Dominick. “I didn’t want to but she claimed he had information he wanted to share. ‘Promise me one thing,’ she said after I agreed to do it. ‘Promise me you’ll be nice.’”

  Frank and Solomon drove up to Dominick’s house in Hadlyme on the Connecticut shore. “And what a place it was,” said Frank. “It overlooked a river, with marshes and tributaries. I didn’t want to leave. And Dominick and I hit it off. By the time we finished, he was showing me all around the place. He had a picture of Elizabeth Taylor in the living room. And he and I, a one-time actor, just got to talking.”

  As Dominick had with me, he began passing tips to Frank. One involved Paul Terrien, whose brother George was Jimmy Terrien’s stepfather. Paul Terrien had appeared at one of Dominick’s book signings and told Dominick there had been a conspiracy to kill Martha and that two boys were involved. Dominick hadn’t been able to speak to him then in more detail. When Dominick visited him at his home in nearby Essex, Paul Terrien refused to say more. Nor would he say more to Frank when he called him.

  A second tip concerned Dr. Kathy Morrall, the Colorado forensic pathologist Solomon had brought to Greenwich years before to examine Littleton. She, too, had appeared at one of Dominick’s book signings, in Denver, and showed Dominick Martha’s autopsy pictures that Jack Solomon had given her.

  “I thought I was serving as an intermediary between Frank and Dominick because of the breakdown in communications between them,” she told me years later.

  Frank didn’t see it that way.

  Frank also called Morrall, and threatened her with arrest. “I told her, ‘I know what you did. I am going to tell you right now, I want you to put all that material that we gave you in an envelope. You send it to me and I better have it and all copies of it.’ She knew what she had done. I also told her that if I didn’t receive those items immediately I would contact the Denver police.”

  “Now let me tell you about this Sutton report,” Frank said to me. “I first heard about it from Dorthy. She calls me at home on a Saturday and tells me Dominick has it and Len Levitt knows about it. It was one of the few times I was upset with her. No, I was furious. I mean, what good does Dominick Dunne or Len Levitt having the report do? Are they going to make an arrest? Why hasn’t anyone told me? So I called Dominick and he gave it to me. But there was nothing in it. It was all theories and speculation.”

  There was more in Dominick’s fax that foreshadowed our troubles with him.

  “Then along came Mark Fuhrman,” the fax continued. “His literary agent was Lucianne Goldberg, who used to be a friend of mine. She told me Mark was looking for an unsolved murder to write about for his next book….

  “To give this report to Mark was a calculated decision and a brilliant one if I say so myself. It has nothing to do with the fact that I knew him from the O. J. Simpson case. It had everything to do with the fact that he is both famous and infamous, and I knew that he would get on every television show on network and cabl
e and tell the story of Martha Moxley over and over and over, until it finally began to sink in…. Whatever you think of Mark, he’s a star….

  “By the way, his publisher would only make the deal on the condition that I write the introduction…I was paid nothing and I’m a very high-priced author….”

  Reading the fax with Frank at his kitchen table, I felt as though a giant wave had knocked us down, then rolled over us. For the past fifteen years, he and I had done the case’s grunt work. I had kept it alive in the media. My articles on the Sutton report had redirected the investigation back to the Skakels. Without Frank, the case would have died years before.

  Now, a new team had arrived: a celebrity writer and a disgraced detective. They would ride that wave to stardom.

  I had laughed at Dominick when I first met him and he said he could help solve the case through his upper-class connections. Now he had turned the tables on me. I was furious—less at Fuhrman, whom I’d never met, than at Dominick by whom I felt betrayed. Well, perhaps betrayed was too strong a word. You had to know someone well to feel betrayed. I only thought I knew Dominick.

  “Writers,” Frank had said, “they’re all the same.” When he’d said that, I’d become angry at him. Now I could understand what he meant.

  I tried to dispel Dominick’s claims but I found I was powerless to correct them. He and Fuhrman were names. Frank and I were the grunts. An article in the New York Observer called them the stars. It called Frank and me the “hacks.”

  I was also furious at myself for feeling the way I did. All these years I’d been telling myself and anyone else who asked that my sole concern was helping to solve Martha Moxley’s murder. So why should it matter that Dominick and Fuhrman got the credit? For all my high-minded talk about a journalist’s proper role, my jealousy made me feel like a smaller person.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  “Nobody Will Believe You”

  CONNECTICUT

  1997–1998

  In the fall of 1997, Fuhrman arrived in Connecticut. His ghostwriter Steve Weeks asked if I would meet with them and I invited them to my house for lunch. We ate sandwiches on my back porch and sized each other up.

  Like everyone in America, I know Fuhrman as the detective in the O.J. Simpson case, charged with perjury for denying he used the slur “nigger.” There seemed something bizarre about someone who was trashed in the O.J. case as a liar, then wrote a best-selling book about it. His decision to come to Connecticut to pursue a murder he knew nothing about seemed foolhardy but bold.

  Realizing the difficulties I knew he would face, chiefly a short deadline for his manuscript, I offered to help. But our meeting did not go well.

  I told him I wanted to write an article for Newsday about Dominick’s giving him the Sutton report.

  “I don’t want you to do that,” Fuhrman said.

  “Why not?” I asked.

  “It won’t be helpful.”

  “What does that mean?”

  Fuhrman did not answer.

  I wrote the article the following week.

  I never heard from him again.

  •

  Through Dominick, Fuhrman sought to meet with Frank.

  Frank and I were having breakfast at the Lakeside. Fuhrman and Weeks were holed up at the three-star Homestead Inn in Greenwich.

  “Dominick says to me, ‘Did you ever hear of this guy Mark Fuhrman?’” Frank began. “What does he think, I live in a cave?

  “‘I think he got a bad rap,’ Dominick says. ‘I want to help him. I want to bring you two together. I want you and Mark to come into the city. I want you to work with him.’”

  “‘I can’t tell him anything more than he could get at the local library, from the Freedom of Information report, or from old newspaper reports,’ I say. There is a silence—dead air on Dominick’s side of the telephone.

  “That ended my relationship with Dominick. From that point on, I was no good. Any time Dominick had a shot, he took it. It was all because I refused to meet with Fuhrman.”

  Writing in “Trail of Guilt” (Vanity Fair, October 2000), Dominick put it this way: “I gave a cocktail party for [Fuhrman]. I’ve always admired cops and I hate to see the way they are treated on the stand by defense attorneys at murder trials. I invited several local cops and their wives, as well as some O.J. junkies among the weekenders who wanted to meet the famous—or infamous—Mark Fuhrman. I also called to invite Frank Garr, thinking he would be thrilled that another book on the case was in the works. He wasn’t thrilled at all….”

  “Next,” Frank continued, “Fuhrman calls me. ‘How about we get together?’ he says. ‘I am writing this book. I can use some help. I know you have a lot of stuff.’

  “‘I do, Mark,’ I say, ‘but I can’t share it with you. All I can tell you is, go to the Greenwich library and get the Freedom of Information report that Len Levitt wrote about in the newspaper. That is the best I can do.’

  “Then he asks me to have lunch with him. He says, ‘I never heard of a cop who turned down a free meal.’ Well, I took that as an insult. That was the end of that conversation.”

  •

  Next, Dorthy telephoned him.

  “She says, ‘Frank, would you do me a favor?’

  “‘What is it?’ I say. She knows I could never refuse her anything. Remember how I told you she got me to agree to see Dominick?

  “‘Mark is here,’ she says. ‘Would you please speak to him?’

  “‘Okay,’ I say. ‘Put him on.’

  “‘Frank, I know you said you wouldn’t but I need some help. Frank, I want to work with you.’

  “‘Mark, I told you I can’t share anything with you.’

  “‘You’ll be sorry,’ Fuhrman says. ‘If you don’t cooperate with me, I’ll make you look like shit in my book.’

  “Well, I’m furious at him now. I’m furious at Dorthy Moxley for putting me in this position. Fuhrman knows better than anyone that detectives can’t talk about ongoing cases. If someone came to him when he was a homicide detective in L.A. and asked him to share information, Fuhrman would have thrown him out of his office. And he would have been right.

  “‘Who the fuck do you think you’re talking to?’ I say to him. ‘Put Mrs. Moxley back on the phone.’

  “When she comes on the line, I say to her, ‘Mrs. Moxley, don’t ever do that to me again.’”

  •

  Frank’s situation with Fuhrman only grew worse. In the spring of 1998, there were rumors about Fuhrman’s book. Dominick was saying Fuhrman would name Michael as Martha’s killer.

  Again, Frank went to state’s attorney Donald Browne. “We have to move on this,” he said. “If Fuhrman’s book comes out before we act, no one will believe we had the information first. We will never convince people. They will all say, ‘Mark Fuhrman solved the case.’”

  “What’s he got?” Browne answered.

  “Nothing I don’t already have.”

  It was then that Browne broached the possibility of withdrawing from the case. Jonathan Benedict—his successor as Fairfield County’s state’s attorney—had begun familiarizing himself with it.

  “Maybe it is better if Benedict picks up on this,” Browne said.

  “It’s your call,” Frank answered. He felt Browne was not aggressive enough but Browne knew the case. Benedict didn’t. To get up to speed, Benedict would need time, which they didn’t have.

  “You have been on it since it happened,” Frank said. “It will take Benedict two, three months to review the case. But you have to make a decision one way or the other.”

  Meanwhile, early in 1998, another book on the Moxley case was published, Greentown (New York: Arcade Books, 1998) by Tim Dumas, the young Greenwich writer.

  “Some journalists on this story have wondered,” Dumas wrote, “whether Browne has been ‘paid off.’ They note that, strategically, he’d be the right man to pay off since he holds the power to keep the case in abeyance.”

  After supervising the Mox
ley case for twenty-three years, Browne cited those two sentences to bail out of the case. Frank called me to tip me off.

  “You’re not going to believe this,” he said. “Browne is out. And you know the reason he gives? He says that because of Dumas’s book, he has a conflict of interest. The real reason he’s withdrawing is because he’s afraid to make a decision whether or not to go forward with the case. He used that line as an excuse to bail out.”

  I called the Stamford Advocate and told them I had a story for them. I told Frank I wanted to use his line.

  “Use it,” he said. “Just attribute it to a law enforcement source.”

  Then I called Browne at home. I told him I heard he had resigned.

  “There’s a perception of conflict now,” he said. “If I proceeded to indict, I am leaving myself exposed as having done it to avoid the perception I have been paid off. If I don’t, then the perception is I have already been paid off.”

  I then read him Frank’s quote.

  “Where did you hear that?” he said.

  “Is it true?”

  “I can figure out where it came from.”

  Those were Browne’s final words on the case. No one heard from him again.

  •

  And so Benedict, another career prosecutor, took over the investigation. Lanky and white-haired, married with three grown children, he looked like a shorter version of Jimmy Stewart. The son of a lawyer, he had graduated from Lafayette College and St. John’s Law School in New York and served three years in the army, including one in Vietnam. He had worked in private practice with his father for two years, then in 1976 joined the state’s attorney’s office, where he’d remained ever since.

  Frank went after him with the same argument he’d made to Browne: If Fuhrman’s book appeared before Benedict sought the grand jury, the world would believe it was Fuhrman who’d caused them to call it. If the grand jury indicted Michael, everyone would think Fuhrman had solved the case.