Framed: Why Michael Skakel Spent Over a Decade in Prison for a Murder He Didn't Commit by Jr. Robert F. Kennedy

Author:Jr., Robert F. Kennedy [Jr., Robert F. Kennedy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Crime, History, Politics, Mystery
Amazon: B01EEQ9B4G
Goodreads: 30984001
Publisher: Skyhorse
Published: 2016-02-09T08:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 12

The Gossip

Gossiping and lying go hand in hand.

—Russian proverb

There’s a scene at the beginning of the appalling 2002 television adaptation of Murder in Greenwich where Mark Fuhrman, played by the actor Christopher Meloni, in a risible toupee, arrives in Greenwich to research his book on the Moxley murder. “If the Kennedys weren’t connected to this, there wouldn’t even be a book,” Fuhrman growls to his ghostwriter. Those might have been the only true words spoken in that horrendous film. There would be no books, no made-for-television films, no national media coverage, had, say, Kenny Littleton rather than a “Kennedy cousin” been on trial for the murder. Dominick Dunne was the alchemist who poured the Kennedys into the Moxley murder tragedy and minted gold.

Dunne, who successfully transformed his lifelong fascination with celebrity and wealth into a career as a gossip and a novelist, had personal reasons for his attraction to this case. John Sweeney, a Wolfgang Puck restaurant chef, served less than three years in prison for strangling Dunne’s daughter in 1982. “I was so outraged about our justice system,” Dunne told a reporter in 1996, “that everything I’ve written since has dealt with that system—how people with money and power get different verdicts than other people.”

Dunne’s brief career as a Hollywood producer faltered as a result of his alcoholism and drug addiction. At his lowest ebb, Dunne famously sold his West Highland Terrier for $300 to buy cocaine. He fled Hollywood in 1979. Three years later, Dunne’s only daughter, Dominique, a gifted 22-year-old actress who’d just made her film debut in Poltergeist, was murdered by her ex-boyfriend. Dunne attributed the killer’s short sentence to the fact that the jury never heard about Sweeney’s violent history with women. Tina Brown, then the editor-in-chief of Vanity Fair, encouraged Dunne to keep a journal during the trial, and in 1984 Brown published a feature based on his notes, headlined “Justice: A Father’s Account of the Trial of His Daughter’s Killer.” The acclaimed piece gave Dunne new life as Vanity Fair’s crime columnist. Dunne built his career on linking notorious murders to powerful people, including John and Patsy Ramsey, Claus von Bulow, and O.J. Simpson. That successful formula gave Dunne his own measure of celebrity and wealth.

By the time Dunne covered O.J. Simpson’s 1995 trial, he may have been the second most-recognizable person in the courtroom after the defendant. Dunne was a small man, with a thick white mane. He toddled about Los Angeles County Superior Court in tailored suits and natty Turnbull & Asser shirts and ties. His trademark round glasses and scowl lent him the aspect of a dyspeptic owl. Judge Ito, presiding over the Simpson trial, angered reporters by favoring the similarly bereaved Dunne with a seat among the victims’ families.

In the Simpson trial, Dunne had a clearly guilty defendant to rail against. But in subsequent trials, his highly speculative, gossipy barbs started to get him in trouble. In a succession of wildly reckless reporting, Dunne erroneously blamed innocent, un-indicted people for murders, and for using power or money to thwart their accusers.

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