R.I.P. Dominick Dunne

Newsday- Author, journalist Dominick Dunne dead at 83

Author and journalist Dominick Dunne, gadfly of the celebrity courtroom and diarist of celebrity excess, died Wednesday in Manhattan after a battle with bladder cancer, according to his son, actor-producer Griffin Dunne. He was 83.

During his decades-long career covering high-profile murders, profiling the famous and mingling with high society, Dunne became something of a journalistic-literary enigma, whose persona bristled with righteous indignation, while wielding the kind of lofty connections, aerial perspective and undiluted opinions that made him a combination Walter Winchell and Marcel Proust.

As fate would have it, Dunne's death fell on the same day as Sen. Edward M. Kennedy's. Dunne had crossed paths with the Kennedy family several times during his career, and with dramatic repercussions.

A onetime intimate of Kennedy in-law Peter Lawford, Dunne had revived interest in the 1975 Martha Moxley murder through his novel "A Season in Purgatory" and was instrumental in helping make the case against another Kennedy in-law, Michael Skakel, who was eventually convicted of the crime. Dunne also covered the William Kennedy Smith rape case in 1991 for Vanity Fair, the magazine with which he was associated for many years.

Dunne, brother of author John Gregory Dunne and brother-in-law of Joan Didion, was born in 1925 in Hartford, Conn., to a wealthy Irish Catholic family. He served in the Army during World War II, winning the Bronze Star for heroism in 1944 after carrying two wounded men to safety at the Battle of Merz, in Feisberg, Germany. He later wrote, "Winning a medal was the only thing I can ever remember doing that won any admiration from my father." He graduated from Williams College in 1949.

Dunne was a novelist ("The Two Mrs. Grenvilles"), a film producer ("Ash Wednesday"), a TV executive and amateur prosecutor - Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Skakel's cousin, told New York magazine in 1993 that Dunne was a "pathetic creature" and had persecuted Skakel for his own aggrandizement. For his part, Dunne's motivation in pursuing the Moxley murder stemmed in part from the fact that Martha Moxley was killed Oct. 30 - seven years to the date before his own daughter, the actress Dominique Dunne, would be killed by an ex-boyfriend on her porch in West Hollywood.

Dunne's account of the trial of the man accused of Dominique's murder was his first article for Vanity Fair, which he joined in 1984 as a contributing editor and where he was named special correspondent in 1993. His coverage of the trials of O.J. Simpson, Phil Spector, Erik and Lyle Menendez, Skakel, Kennedy Smith, and the impeachment of President Bill Clinton, were unorthodox and decidedly unobjective. In 2005, Gary Condit won an undisclosed amount of money from Dunne, who had to apologize, after having implicated Condit in the disappearance of intern Chandra Levy, with whom he had been having an affair. In November 2006, he was sued again by Condit for comments made on CNN, but that suit was tossed out.

Dunne profiled numerous personalities, among them Imelda Marcos, Robert Mapplethorpe, Elizabeth Taylor, Claus von Bülow, Adnan Khashoggi, and Warren Beatty and Annette Bening. Among his credits as a producer were the TV series "Adventures in Paradise" and "The Boys in the Band," the pioneering drama about gay life. Two of his films, "The Panic in Needle Park" and "Play It As It Lays," were written or co-written by his brother John and Didion. But it is for his work covering the intersection of culture and crime that Dunne will likely be best remembered.

He is survived by his two sons, Griffin and Alexander. Their mother, Ellen, who was divorced from Dunne, died in 1997.

Crime Library Files: Martha Moxley Murder

The Martha Moxley murder trial culminates in a guilty verdict for Michael Skakel.

Read the facts leading up to this historical decision.

[CrimeLibrary.com article ]

Matthew Margolies

Poor little Matthew. This always struck close to home, because it's one of two crazy unsolved murders from my hometown- Greenwich, Connecticut. Although Martha Moxely's justice took a while to achieve, justice was finally served in her case, a feeling of closure that unfortunately the Margolies family hasn't had the fortune of having.

NY Daily News Crime File Article:


The other Greenwich murder

----------------------------------------------------

BY DAVID J. KRAJICEK
SPECIAL TO THE DAILY NEWS

Sunday, September 2nd 2007, 4:00 AM
Summer was in its Labor Day swoon, and eighth grade loomed just ahead for Matthew Margolies.

His footloose days were numbered, so he decided to spend Aug. 31, 1984 - Friday of the holiday weekend - pursuing his favorite hobby: angling.

The gangly 13-year-old was Greenwich, Conn.'s version of Huck Finn. He was rarely seen without a fishing pole, stalking chubby trout in the Byram River near his home on Pilgrim Drive, which traverses the border between Greenwich and Port Chester, N.Y.

Young Margolies lived with his mother, Maryann, and older sister in the blue-collar Pemberwick section of Greenwich, far from the broad lawns and mansions of Belle Haven.

Maryann Margolies worked as a nurse, and Matthew was a latchkey kid, splitting time between his own home and that of his maternal grandmother, who lived a few blocks away.

It had been a difficult year for Matthew.

His parents had split up, and he had become estranged from his father, who moved to Texas. His beloved grandfather and angling guru, George Miazga, had died earlier that month, leaving Matthew without a fishing buddy.

Yet the boy never lost his passion for the sport, his mother would later say. On most days, he would pull on his distinctive black-and-white checkered sneakers and head to the river.

At 4:30 p.m. that Friday, passersby saw the boy fishing at one of his favorite spots, the Comley Ave. bridge over the Byram, near his grandma's place.

Maryann Margolies had arranged to pick him up at 5. Matthew was normally punctual, and his mother was concerned when he failed to show up.

She drove the neighborhood, then phoned police at 7 p.m., as darkness beckoned.

She found herself up against the familiar missing-child bugaboo. Greenwich police told her to drive around and call the boy's name. They suggested he may have been despondent and in hiding over the trauma of losing his grandfather.

Call again if he doesn't turn up, cops told the panicked mother.

On Saturday afternoon, police finally mustered a legitimate response, including media bulletins and a search. They would look for several days but find nothing.

On Wednesday, Sept. 5, a man who had read about the missing boy was walking in the woods when he spotted a pair of checkered sneakers strewn beside the footpath.

He ran to alert police, and the body of young Matthew was found nearby beneath tree branches and stones.

He had been killed there, police said, near the river half a mile upstream from where he was last seen fishing.

It was a horrible way to die. He had been stabbed a dozen times in the torso and neck, and his hands were slashed to ribbons. He had died fighting.

His mouth and throat had been jammed with dirt and sticks while he was still alive, and he had died of asphyxiation.

Authorities judged it a torture death. A woman in the area later reported that she heard a boy's agonized screams at about 6 on the evening he went missing.

Matthew was found in his underwear, although he had not been molested. Police theorized his shorts were removed in an act of humiliation, not sexual assault.

The murder weapon - an old 10-1/2--inch boning knife with a wooden handle - was found near the body.

The murder seemed to be a spontaneous act, perhaps by a psychopathic teenager.

With a body, crime scene evidence and a distinct murder weapon in hand, police seemed likely to solve the murder.

They had at least eight suspects, including several teenagers. One was a 16-year-old bully who lived near the murder scene. Another was found with the fishing rod Matthew used that Friday. (He claimed he bought it from him for $2.)

But weeks and months passed without an arrest. A year after the murder, a Greenwich police captain confidently told a reporter, "Somebody knows who owns this knife. Sooner or later, that person will come forward."

So far, he's been wrong.

For years, the Margolies slaying was known as Greenwich's other unsolved murder. But it garnered only a fraction of the attention given the 1975 clubbing death of Martha Moxley, 15, in the city's Belle Harbor gated enclave.

The Moxley family finally got justice in 2002, when Kennedy cousin Michael Skakel was convicted and sentenced to 20 years in prison.

But the Margolies family still waits, 23 years later.

In his book about the Moxley case, Los Angeles Detective Mark Fuhrman gave this damning assessment of the local police: "In Greenwich, unsolved homicides are business as usual. Other than self-solvers, I could not find a single homicide in nearly 50 years that the Greenwich police have actually solved."

When the Margolies probe stalled, the city hired Vernon Geberth, the ace NYPD homicide investigator, to evaluate the investigation. He wasn't impressed.

Geberth noted that until the body was found, the investigation was assigned not to detectives but to youth division officers, who were more accustomed to tracking runaways than solving murders.

Greenwich police prefer not to say much nowadays about the investigation, which has been passed to a state cold case squad.

The state has a standing $50,000 reward offer, but any chance of solving the murder likely lies with DNA from the stored crime scene evidence.

A few years ago, investigators scrutinized Roger Bates, an ex-Port Chester cop convicted of sex abuse of a teenage boy in Texas. He was said to have been acquainted with young Margolies, but that lead dead-ended, too.

The victim would have been 36 this Labor Day weekend - and he'd probably have been fishing.

Instead, a plaque in memory of Greenwich's Huck Finn stands over one of his favorite holes on the Byram. It reads:

"Matthew Margolies,

An Excellent Angler,

And Now With God

1971-1984"