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

by Robert Hofler

  Dominick vehemently disagreed with Garr on that point and, feeling dismissed by the detective, he toyed with giving the report to another reporter. He had recently met with Timothy Dumas, who planned to write a nonfiction book on the murder. Dumas grew up in Greenwich, born only a year after Martha Moxley. Dominick told the young reporter he would help him with his book in any way possible. Except one. In the end, Dominick had other plans for the Sutton report, plans that would not only incense Frank Garr but punish the detective for having chastised him.

  It was not difficult finding Mark Fuhrman. The disgraced detective had signed with the agent Lucianne Goldberg, who sold Fuhrman’s first book, Murder in Brentwood. He was now looking to solve another murder for his follow-up book. “Nick always thought Mark got a raw deal on the O.J. trial,” said Goldberg. It was only natural for the agent to ask her Vanity Fair friend, who specialized in notable murders, if he knew of any good unsolved cases for her client to investigate.

  Even before Murder in Brentwood hit the best-seller lists in late 1997, Goldberg arranged for the two men to meet at perhaps the most conspicuous spot in all of New York City. The timing could not have been better for a high-profile lunch at the Four Seasons. Crushed by his round of phone calls with Len Levitt and Frank Garr, Dominick decided to side with Fuhrman to tell him all he knew about the Moxley murder. “Hey, Mark, I’ve got just the one for you, and I have a private detective report that’s going to knock you on your ass,” he said.

  Levitt tried to remain in touch, but at this point Dominick responded to the newspaper reporter only by fax. Among other disputes, he believed Levitt had exposed Jamie Bryan to his superiors at Sutton Associates. Dominick sent a fax to the reporter: “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’s fax also revealed his deep disappointment with the Connecticut detective on the case: “In time I gave a copy to Frank Garr. . . . That was a total waste of time.” In the fax, Dominick went on to reveal why he had given the Sutton report to Fuhrman: “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 cable 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.”

  Levitt described how he felt reading Dominick’s fax: “I felt as though a giant wave had knocked us down then rolled over us.”

  Garr put it more succinctly: “Writers, they’re all the same.”

  Dominick enjoyed the hurly-burly of putting himself at the center of a murder investigation. He also needed the work more than ever—not for the money but the distraction. In the previous decade, Lenny Dunne had sold her house in Beverly Hills and was now living on her family ranch in Arizona. Alex often stayed with his mother, since her condition had continued to deteriorate seriously. “Griffin took care of my father like I took care of our mother,” said Alex. Years earlier, he had asked a neurologist, “What is the best thing I can do for my mother right now?” The doctor leaned back in his chair and said, “If I had Dr. Kervorkian’s phone number, I’d give it to you.”

  Dominick visited Lenny at Christmastime in 1996. Bedridden, she could no longer speak without great difficulty and required six nurses to care for her around the clock. Sitting beside her, he thought about all the lies he had told. “I’m sorry, Lenny,” Dominick said. “You know, Lenny, I always loved you no matter what.” He believed he was not good enough, he was not worthy. She was the real thing; he was a fake. To keep her company, he reminisced about their old friends in Los Angeles and gave her the latest news. “Do you remember the Starks? Now they’ve moved,” he said.

  Griffin remembered his father being by his mother’s side near the end. She enjoyed listening to his news and gossip, which had not always been the case when they were husband and wife. Ellen Griffin Dunne passed away at the nearby Holy Cross Hospital on January 9, 1997. The family asked in lieu of flowers for donations to be made to Justice for Homicide Victims, the organization she founded in the previous decade.

  Dominick always asked Alex to do nothing rash until Lenny passed away. Father and son never spoke the name of the man who had murdered Dominique, and Alex observed that moratorium even in the latest fight with his father. Suffering from what he described as “mental health issues,” Alex berated Dominick, much as he had in a San Francisco restaurant more than ten years ago. This time was different, however. He put his thoughts in a letter. Dominick believed what triggered the new confrontation was an article on depression that he had clipped from the Wall Street Journal and mailed to his son. Faced with this new flare-up, Dominick could only wonder again what he had done as a father to provoke such anger. He could not, however, overlook Alex’s demand to be disinherited. If he were not written out of his father’s will, Alex vowed to give any money Dominick left him to the man who had murdered Dominique. Dominick did as ordered and wrote up a new will. He disinherited his younger son but made sure to attach his son’s written demand to the new will. He did not want anyone ever to think he had made such a decision on his own volition.

  15

  Fuhrman and Libel

  With Dominick’s full support, Mark Fuhrman came to Greenwich, Connecticut, to start research on his next book. It did not begin well.

  He met with Len Levitt, who lost no time telling him he would write a damning article for Newsday about Dominick giving Fuhrman the Sutton report. End of conversation. Fuhrman next phoned Frank Garr, offering to take him to lunch. When Garr refused to meet, Fuhrman said, “I never heard of a cop who turned down a free meal.” End of conversation.

  Before Fuhrman tried to contact Dorthy Moxley, Dominick thought it best that he place a call to the victim’s mother. The detective, obviously, needed some help.

  Dominick’s phone call came “out of the blue,” said Dorthy. It was as if they had never stopped talking, even though they had not spoken for several months. He sounded very upbeat, telling her, “Somebody wants to write a book and solve the case. Would you be willing to solve the case?”

  Dorthy did not hold grudges. “I’ll talk to anyone,” she said.

  “You’ll be surprised who it is. It’s Mark Fuhrman.”

  Dorthy Moxley took a deep breath before saying she would cooperate with the infamous detective. But later, when speaking to Fuhrman, she put forth one major request: “Please contact the police.” Fuhrman’s lousy relationship with the police would come to haunt her, “because it made it awkward for me,” she recalled.

  Dominick was not the only one who found Fuhrman an extremely attractive man. Dorthy Moxley called him “very handsome, a charismatic person, and he was definitely a wonderful detective.” He impressed her as soon as they met. But when Fuhrman pressed Dorthy to phone Frank Garr to help facilitate a rapprochement, Garr was not happy. He told her, “Mrs. Moxley, don’t ever do that to me again.”

  Finally, it came down to Dominick to make the introductions at a cocktail party he hosted. As he wrote in Vanity Fair, “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.”

  Len Levitt understood Frank Garr’s position. “Why would Garr want to talk to a convicted perjurer?
” asked Levitt. At the time, Garr had already heard the rumor, emanating from Dominick, that Fuhrman would name Michael Skakel as the killer. Garr did not need the pressure, even though he came to the same conclusion back in 1992. Unlike Fuhrman, he must put together a case that would convince a grand jury to indict, not just sell a few thousand books.

  Fuhrman cultivated a loyal supporter in Dominick, and through him the L.A. detective got to an assistant state’s attorney who would eventually be a prosecutor at the Skakel trial.

  Chris Morano received frequent phone calls from Dominick during the O.J. Simpson trial. They knew each other through mutual friends in Hartford, Connecticut, and Dominick wanted Morano’s opinion of Dr. Henry Lee, a forensics expert testifying for the Simpson defense. “Dr. Lee was running the crime lab in Connecticut at the time,” Morano recalled, “and Nick would bounce ideas off me. After the O.J. trial, he was not a fan of Lee.” (Lee, in his testimony, cast doubt on the splash pattern of droplets of Simpson’s blood at his Rockingham estate. Lee also raised the possibility of there being a second shoe print at the crime scene, a pattern later verified to be trowel marks left in the cement walkway leading to Nicole Brown Simpson’s condo.)

  While Levitt and Garr refused to see him, Fuhrman had better luck with Dominick’s friend Chris Morano. The two men met in a parking lot in Essex, Connecticut. They were not alone. Fuhrman brought his cowriter, Steven Weeks, and Morano “brought a person I trusted. We both had echo people there.” Morano was skeptical, but after three hours of interviewing Fuhrman, he realized the detective was a good one and “he’d done a lot to look into” the Moxley murder.

  Sometime during their first meeting, Fuhrman asked, “Where can we get a beer around here?” Morano took him to a local watering hole, where the bartender asked the obligatory “What can I get you?”

  “I’ll have a rum and coke,” replied Morano, “and this guy will have a glass of O.J.” For a moment, Morano thought he had crossed a line, and probably he did. But, not wanting to alienate one of the few law enforcers in Connecticut who would talk to him, Fuhrman laughed at the joke—after a brief pause. “Humility is the opiate of the mediocre,” Morano surmised. “Mark had a big ego. He knew he was good.” But he was also eager to get along with Morano; he even answered questions about the N-word controversy. “They spent a quarter-million dollars to get dirt on me from this [film] script,” Fuhrman explained, referring to Laura Hart McKinny’s tapes.

  The conversation between Fuhrman and Morano eventually got around to the Sutton report. Fuhrman had studied it and connected the dots: Michael Skakel murdered Martha Moxley, he believed. The two men agreed to stay in touch but may not have spoken again if not for Dominick and “his relationships with people” in New England, said Morano.

  One morning, Michael Skakel made the mistake of being a good Connecticut citizen. Finding a pocketbook by the side of the road, he walked it into a state trooper’s office to give the lost item to the authorities. “I have to fill out a report,” a trooper told him. “What’s your name?”

  “Michael Skakel.”

  Skakel did not leave it there. He went on to reveal not only his Kennedy lineage but his plans to write a tell-all book about the famous clan. The trooper listened, filled out the report, and waited for Skakel to leave the station. Then he phoned his friend in Hadlyme, Connecticut.

  “Dominick could really sit down and talk to anybody and make friends,” said Morano, and one of his unlikely friends was this state trooper.

  The trooper told Dominick, “Nick, Michael Skakel’s writing a book!”

  Dominick, in turn, phoned Morano, who phoned Fuhrman, who already had in his possession the Skakel book proposal. The two men met again, this time in New York City. The book proposal was only five pages, but it contained a section titled “Murder Most Foul,” in which Skakel wrote about the murder of Martha Moxley. Morano knew not to take the proposal from Fuhrman.

  “With the O.J. trial, there’s a whole perjury thing with Fuhrman, and the last thing I want is for Mark Fuhrman on the stand in our case,” said Morano. Instead, he wrote down the name of Skakel’s ghostwriter, Richard Hoffman, and immediately contacted him. He used a ruse to lure Hoffman: “Hi, this is Joe Schmoe with the Rotary Club, and we’d like you to talk about your book.”

  Hoffman fell for it, and investigators were able to secure a taped interview the writer did with Skakel, conducted for their book proposal, which included a thirty-minute talk on the murder. Skakel did not admit to the crime, but the story he told Hoffman was a little different from what he had said previously. “The story now has changed three times, which is very helpful,” said Morano. “Dominick and Fuhrman were instrumental in getting [us] that key piece of evidence.”

  In the taped interview with Hoffman, Skakel tried to cast suspicions on the tutor Ken Littleton, but, more significant, his story about what happened the night of the murder changed yet again. In this third version, Michael revealed not only his masturbating but another telling detail: after the peeping-tom scene outside Martha’s bedroom window, Michael returned to the Skakel house, where he walked by his sister’s bedroom. Julie Skakel was asleep, but Michael somehow knew that her friend Andrea Shakespeare had been there and left to go home. “But how would he have known that?” asked Morano. “[Shakespeare] had gone home when he was not there. He knew something that he should not have known.”

  The night of the Moxley murder, when Julie Skakel walked Andrea Shakespeare to her car, a figure in the shadows ran in front of them. “Michael, what are you doing?” asked Shakespeare. Her question was damning: Michael’s alibi had always been that he was not there, that he had spent the evening at a friend’s house, the Terriens’.

  Shakespeare’s “Michael, what are you doing?” became so crucial to the prosecution’s case that Morano and the other prosecutors kept it secret until their final rebuttal before the jury.

  Dominick continued to show an uncommon dedication to Mark Fuhrman, especially when Timothy Dumas asked for a copy of the Sutton report “to even the playing field.” Dominick had no interest in helping a competitor. The Sutton report, he believed, belonged to his good friend Fuhrman.

  When Dominick traveled to London, he even lent the detective his New York apartment so that he could work on Murder in Greenwich. Friends could only imagine the hyperbutch Fuhrman ensconced in Dominick’s chintz-laden abode with its French antiques and mint green walls.

  Lucianne Goldberg observed her phone mate’s infatuation. “Nick was crazy about Fuhrman,” she said, “wild about Fuhrman,” to the point of obsession, not unlike his attraction to Frederick Combs. In London, Dominick made repeated transatlantic phone calls to Goldberg about his new apartment guest. Even long distance, taking care of Mark Fuhrman’s every need became a top priority for Dominick, and that included what deli in the neighborhood would deliver the best food to his East Forty-Ninth Street apartment.

  “The guy’s name at the deli is Harry,” Dominick told Goldberg. “And tell Mark to say he’s Dominick Dunne’s friend and he’s a personal friend.”

  Two days later, Goldberg got another call from Dominick. “Did you tell Mark about the guy at the deli, Harry?”

  “Yeah, I told him,” she replied. The agent could only wonder how much more pastrami Harry would pack in a sandwich if Fuhrman mentioned the name Dominick Dunne.

  Goldberg called the two men “tight friends for a long time, and Nick wanted to defend Fuhrman anyway he could. He was always Mark’s defender.” Dominick’s care, however, went far beyond supporting the detective. “Nick had a death-like crush on Mark,” said Goldberg.

  The agent was not the only one who noted Dominick’s new, deep infatuation. Leading up to the Michael Skakel trial, Norman Carby saw how photographs of Fuhrman began appearing all over his boyfriend’s Manhattan apartment.

  The “Harry at the deli” phone calls were some of Dominick and Goldberg’s last friendly chats. In autumn 1997 she confided in him about an intern having oral sex with B
ill Clinton in the Oval Office. “Nick knew about Monica Lewinsky three months before the story broke,” said Goldberg, who knew all about it. She had advised Lewinsky’s friend Linda Tripp to tape phone conversations with the intern, tapes that Tripp eventually turned over to Kenneth Starr, the independent counsel investigating Clinton on Whitewater and other controversies. Dominick was on his way back from London when, instead of a phone call, he sent a fax to Goldberg. It read: “You’re so famous I’m afraid to talk to you.” Later, they did speak on the phone. A staunch Bill Clinton supporter, Dominick could not believe the Lewinsky scandal. “Is there anything I ever told you that wasn’t true?” Goldberg replied. Dominick told her he had seen Vernon Jordan a few weeks ago at the Four Seasons and was going to mention something about Monica Lewinsky to the Clinton adviser. “Now I’m glad I didn’t,” said Dominick. “I don’t want to get involved with it.” (To head off the scandal, Jordan had tried to get Lewinsky a job outside the White House.)

  William Morrow and Company published Mark Fuhrman’s Murder in Greenwich: Who Killed Martha Moxley in May 1998, after the detective had spent less than a year investigating the case. He named Michael Skakel the killer and Frank Garr the chief bungler of the investigation. Fuhrman wrote, “Dominick Dunne gave Frank Garr a copy of the Sutton Associates files in the winter of 1997. Yet apparently Frank had talked to hardly any of the people I interviewed whose names I got from the files.”

  Writing for Vanity Fair, Dominick gave Fuhrman full credit for solving the murder: “I firmly believe that his book, Murder in Greenwich, for which I wrote the introduction, is what caused a grand jury to be called after twenty-five years.”

  The timeline supported Dominick’s assumption but only superficially. Although Fuhrman’s book was not officially published until May 1998, advance copies had been available weeks before as Fuhrman hit the TV circuit to do prepublication publicity. Since the grand jury was called in May, it appeared that the chief state’s attorney, Jonathan Benedict, was playing catch up. Writing a book is one thing; trying a case before the grand jury is another. In the Moxley case, the grand jury stayed in session for eight months, with over fifty witnesses called. In January 2000 Benedict held a news conference to announce that the grand jury had probable cause to indict Michael Skakel in the murder of Martha Moxley.