Dominick Dunne had a front-row seat for some of America's most famous trials. Here are some excerpts of stories he wrote for Vanity Fair, from the Claus von Bulow case to Robert Blake.
From "What a Swell Party He Wrote," Vanity Fair, 2008:
"The thought of writing had been lurking within me for some time, but I felt inadequate compared with the two famous writers in my immediate family -- my brother John Gregory Dunne and his wife, Joan Didion.
I didn’t actually begin until I finally removed myself from the glamorous world in Hollywood, in which I no longer belonged, and installed myself in a one-room cabin, without telephone or television, in the Cascade Mountains of Oregon. There I lived in virtual silence and timidly began my next career as a writer and a recorder of the social history of the time.
A tragic event in my personal life changed me forever. In 1982, my only daughter, Dominique, was strangled to death by a former boyfriend who stalked her. I had never attended a trial until my daughter’s murder trial. What I witnessed in that courtroom enraged and redirected me. It wouldn’t be necessary to hire a killer to kill the killer of my daughter, as I had contemplated. I could write about it. I could go on shows like Larry King Live and talk about it. I could become an advocate for victims."
From the same article:
"I knew from the first moment I walked in the door of the Vanity Fair offices in the old Conde Nast building, at 350 Madison Avenue, that at long last I had found the place I was supposed to be. The almost quarter-century that I have spent at Vanity Fair has gone beyond the wildest dreams of glamour and drama of my childhood. I have worked under two great editors, Tina Brown and Graydon Carter.
The places I’ve been. The people I’ve met. The extraordinary situations I have been in. The trials I have covered. As the nation watched, I was only a few feet away from O. J. Simpson when he was acquitted of stabbing to death his wife, Nicole, and her friend Ron Goldman.
I hate watching defense attorneys hug and shake hands with one another after they win an acquittal for a man they know is guilty. The man who strangled my daughter got a traffic-court sentence that let him out after two and a half years."
From "Nightmare on Elm Drive," Vanity Fair, 1990:
"On a recent New York–to–Los Angeles trip on MGM Grand Air, that most luxurious of all coast-to-coast flights, I was chilled to the bone marrow during a brief encounter with a fellow passenger, a boy of perhaps fourteen, or fifteen, or maybe even sixteen, who lounged restlessly in a sprawled-out fashion, arms and legs akimbo, avidly reading racing-car magazines, chewing gum, and beating time to the music on his Walkman.
