Sobbing, Sweeney apologized to the court and said he had not been trying to escape. Judge Katz accepted his apology. “We know what a strain you are under, Mr. Sweeney,” he said. I was appalled at the lack of severity of the judge’s admonishment. What we had witnessed had nothing to do with escape. It was an explosion of anger. It showed how little it took to incite John Sweeney to active rage. Like most of the telling moments of the trial, however, it was not witnessed by the jury.
Mike Tipping, a reporter from the Santa Monica Evening Outlook, saw the episode and reported it in his paper. At the behest of Adelson, the court admonished Tipping for exaggerating the incident. The same day, a court gag order was issued to prevent anyone involved in the case from speaking to the press.
From then on, I felt, and continue to feel, that John Sweeney was sedated in the courtroom so that such an incident would never be repeated in front of the jury. He was asked under oath, not in the presence of the jury, if he was sedated, and he said he was not, except for some mild medicine for an upset stomach. The district attorney asked the court for either a blood test or a urine test to substantiate Sweeney’s reply, but Judge Katz denied the request.
When Lenny took the stand the first time, the jury was again not present. Judge Katz had to decide on the admissibility of her testimony, but he wrote notes through most of it and scarcely looked in her direction. Lenny described an incident when Dominique came to her house at night after being beaten by Sweeney—the first of the three times he beat her. Dominique’s terror was so abject, Lenny said, that she assumed a fetal position in the hallway. Sweeney had knocked her head on the floor and pulled out clumps of her hair. Adelson asked Lenny if she knew what the argument that precipitated the beating had been about. Lenny said she did not. He asked her if she knew that Dominique had had an abortion. She didn’t. I didn’t. The boys didn’t. Her closest friends didn’t. It remained throughout the trial an unsubstantiated charge that, to the defense, seemed to justify the beating. The look on Lenny’s face was heartbreaking, as if she had been slapped in public. Judge Katz called her testimony hearsay and said he would make his decision as to its admissibility when the trial resumed on August 15 after a two-week hiatus.
During this period our great friend Katie Manulis died of cancer. Our lives have been intricately involved with the Manuli, as we call them, for twenty-five years. Back at Martin’s house after the funeral, I told Sammy Goldwyn that I had grave doubts about the judge. I cited his solicitousness toward Sweeney after his outburst in the courtroom, as well as his discourtesy with Lenny. Sammy said he was dining that evening with John Van de Kamp, the attorney general of the state of California, and he would get a rundown on the judge for me.
He reported back that Judge Katz went to law school at Loyola University and then served as a deputy district attorney for fourteen years. He had been unpopular in the district attorney’s office, where he was considered a theatrical character. In 1970 he prosecuted members of the Charles Manson “family” for the murders of Shorty Shea and Gary Hinman. In 1978 he was appointed to the Municipal Court by Governor Jerry Brown, and in 1981 he was appointed to the Superior Court. He was considered highly ambitious and was said to like cases with high media visibility, like this one.
Judge Katz ruled that the prosecution could not use the testimony of Lillian Pierce to show the jury that John Sweeney had committed previous acts of violence against women. He said he would allow Miss Pierce to take the stand only in rebuttal if Adelson put expert witnesses, meaning psychiatrists, on the stand to testify that Sweeney was too mentally impaired by emotion to have formed the intent to kill. Once Judge Katz ruled that, Adelson threw out his psychiatric defense. Later in the trial, when the possibility of putting Lillian Pierce on the stand was raised again, by Steven Barshop, Katz ruled that the “prejudicial effect outweighed the probative value.” The jury would never know of Lillian Pierce’s existence until after they had arrived at a verdict.
Judge Katz also ruled that Lenny’s testimony about Dominique’s coming to her in hysterics after Sweeney first beat her on August 27 could not be used by the prosecution during the main case. The judge once again agreed with Adelson that the prejudicial effect of the testimony outweighed its probative value, and he told Barshop not to mention the incident in his primary case. He said he would decide later in the trial whether her story could be used to rebut a mental-impairment defense for Sweeney.
Judge Katz agreed with Adelson that all statements made by Dominique to her agent, her fellow actors, and her friends regarding fear of John Sweeney during the last five weeks of her life must be considered hearsay and ruled inadmissible as evidence.
It was not an auspicious opening to the trial. The loss of the Lillian Pierce testimony was a severe blow to Steven Barshop. Our hopes were buoyed by Barshop’s opening argument in the case. He began with a description of the participants. Sweeney: twenty-seven, six foot one, 170 pounds. Dominique: twenty-two, five foot one, 112 pounds. He gave a rundown of the charges in the two incidents, the assault on Dominique on September 26 and the murder on the night of October 30. He described how Sweeney had walked out of Ma Maison restaurant at 8:30 that evening and proceeded on foot to the house, where he argued with Dominique and strangled her. He said that Dominique was brain-dead there at the scene of the strangulation, despite the fact that she was kept on the life-support system at Cedars-Sinai until November 4. He said that the coroner would testify that death by strangulation took between four and six minutes. Then he held up a watch with a second hand and said to the jury, “Ladies and gentlemen, I am going to show you how long it took for Dominique Dunne to die.” For four minutes the courtroom sat in hushed silence. It was horrifying. I had never allowed myself to think how long she had struggled in his hands, thrashing for life. A gunshot or a knife stab is over in an instant; strangulation is an eternity. The only sound during the four minutes came from Michael Adelson and John Sweeney, who whispered together the whole time.
Our daily presence in the courtroom annoyed Adelson throughout the trial. Defense lawyers in general don’t like jurors to see the victim’s family. Friends of ours had advised us to leave town until the trial was over. The organization known as Parents of Murdered Children advised us to attend every session. “It’s the last business of your daughter’s life,” a father of a young girl stabbed to death by a former boyfriend said to me on the telephone one night. We sat in the front row behind the bailiff’s desk in full view of the jury: Lenny in the aisle in her wheelchair, Alex, Griffin and his girlfriend, and I. We were within six feet of John Sweeney. As the weeks crept by, the boys became more and more silent. It seemed to me as if their youth were being stripped away from them.
In the row behind us sat representatives from Parents of Murdered Children; some had been through their trials, others were awaiting theirs. Many of Dominique’s friends came on a daily basis; so did friends of ours and friends of the boys’. There were also representatives from Women Against Violence Against Women and from Victims for Victims, the group started by Theresa Saldana, an actress who was brutally stabbed a few years ago and survived.
“If any member of the Dunne family cries, cries out, rolls his eyes, exclaims in any way, he will be asked to leave the courtroom,” we were told by the judge at the behest of Adelson.
“Your honor, Alex Dunne had tears in his eyes,” Adelson called out one day. When Sweeney took the stand, Alex and Griffin changed their seats in order to be in his line of vision. Adelson tried to get them put out of the courtroom for this. We were intimidated but never searched. How easy it would have been to enter with a weapon and eradicate the killer if we had been of that mind. As the last week approached, Alex said one morning, “I can’t go back anymore. I can’t be there where Sweeney is.”
Dominique’s friends Bryan Cook and Denise Dennehy flew in from Lake Forest, Illinois, to testify about the time five weeks before the murder when Sweeney attempted to choke Dominique after their night on the town. She had escaped from her house that night by climbing out a bathroom window and driving her Volkswagen to the home of an artist friend called Norman Carby. (Lenny was in New York at the time.) Carby, appalled by the marks of attempted strangulation on her neck, had the presence of mind to take photographs. The pictures were the prosecution’s prime exhibit of the seriousness of the assault. Adelson belittled the pictures. There was, he said, a third picture in the same series showing Dominique laughing. Carby explained that Dominique had a reading that morning for the role of a battered child on Hill Street Blues. Carby said he told her that at least she wouldn’t have to wear any makeup for it, and that had made her laugh.
One of the snitches appeared in the courtroom. He was the one who claimed Sweeney had said he thought he had the police believing he had not intended to kill Dominique. He claimed further that Sweeney had asked him, “Have you ever been with a girl who thought she was better than you?” Snitches are known to be unreliable witnesses, whom jurors usually dislike and distrust. This man’s dossier, forwarded by his prison, depicted a disturbed troublemaker. His arms were tattooed from his shoulders to his wrists. Steven Barshop decided to dispense with his revelations. He was not put on the stand.
On one of the color pictures of the autopsy there was a bruise on Dominique’s shoulder, which gave rise to disagreement. No one was quite sure if it had been incurred when she fell to the ground after being strangled, or if it had been caused by the life-support system, or if it was a result of the autopsy. Adelson was determined that the jury not see the photograph with the bruise, and the arguments went on endlessly while the jury waited in an adjoining room. Judge Katz solved the matter: with a pair of scissors provided by Velma Smith, the court clerk, he simply cut off the picture below the neck so that only the actual strangulation marks were visible to the jury.
Deputy Frank DeMilio, one of the first to arrive at the scene of the crime, testified on the stand that Sweeney had said to him, “Man, I blew it. I killed her. I didn’t think I choked her that hard, but I don’t know, I just kept on choking her. I just lost my temper and blew it again.”
I wondered then and wonder still what the word again meant. Did it refer to one of the other times he attacked Dominique? Or Lillian Pierce? Or is there something else in this mysterious past that has not yet come to light? Sweeney had no car and no driver’s license, an oddity for a young man totally dependent on wheels. And although he had worked as a head chef in one of the most prestigious restaurants in the city, he was nearly totally without funds. Furthermore, an informant at Ma Maison told Detective Johnston of another former girlfriend, then somewhere in France, against whom Sweeney had committed at least one act of violence.
After Steven Barshop rested his case, Judge Katz delivered another devastating blow to the prosecution. He agreed with a request from Adelson that the jury be allowed to consider only charges of manslaughter and second-degree murder, thus acquitting Sweeney of first degree murder. In asking Katz to bar a first degree murder verdict, Adelson argued, “There is no premeditation or deliberation in this case,” and Katz agreed. Barshop argued that the jury should decide whether there was sufficient premeditation or deliberation. He said Sweeney had enough time to consider his actions during the period—up to six minutes, according to the coroner’s testimony—that it took him to choke Dominique. Katz emphasized that Sweeney had arrived at Dominique’s house without a murder weapon, although he knew that Sweeney’s hands had nearly killed Lillian Pierce and that his hands had nearly strangled Dominique five weeks before he killed her. He also cited the fact that Sweeney had made no attempt to escape.
Rarely do twelve people on a jury agree; most verdicts are compromises. If this jury had had the option of first-degree murder and were in a dispute, they could have compromised at second-degree. With first-degree ruled out, if there was a dispute, their only compromise was manslaughter.
Detective Harold Johnston was in the courtroom that day. He believed this was a case of first-degree murder, just as we did. Means of escape and means of method have nothing to do with premeditation, he told us. An informant at Ma Maison had told us that just before Sweeney left the restaurant to go to Dominique’s house on the night he murdered her, he had ordered two martinis from the bar and drunk them. We felt that Sweeney must have decided that if he couldn’t have Dominique, he hasn’t going to let anyone else have her either.
Harold Johnston had become a friend over the year, since the night that he rang the doorbell of Lenny’s house on Crescent Drive at two in the morning to tell her that Dominique was near death at Cedars-Sinai. He had also questioned Sweeney on the night of the murder. He told me in the corridor outside the courtroom that day that the judge’s ruling had made him lose faith in the system after twenty-six years on the force.
One day Adelson’s wife and little boys came to the trial. As if to offset his unpleasant image in front of the jury, Adelson elaborately played father: “Now don’t you talk,” he admonished them, waving his finger. Several times Judge Katz’s mother and father also came to observe the proceedings. They were seated in special chairs set up inside the gate by the bailiff’s desk, and whispered incessantly. Invariably Katz showed off for their benefit. On one occasion, after both Barshop and Adelson had finished with the witness David Packer, the actor who was visiting Dominique at the time of the murder and who called the police, Judge Katz started an independent line of questioning, about eyeglasses, that had not been introduced by either the prosecution or the defense: Did David Packer wear them? Did he have them on the night he saw Sweeney standing over Dominique’s body? The questions advanced nothing and muddied what had gone before.
A photographer from People magazine appeared in court one day, weighed down with equipment. I happened to know him. He said he had been sent to take pictures of our family for an article his magazine was doing on the trial. Neither Griffin nor Alex wished to be photographed, but the photographer stayed in the courtroom and took pictures of the session with Sweeney and the lawyers. At the lunch break the judge signaled to the photographer to see him in his chambers. Later, out in the parking lot, I ran into the man. He told me he had thought the judge was going to ask him not to shoot during the session. Instead, the judge had said he wanted his eyes to show up in the pictures and had tried on several different pairs of glasses for the photographer’s approval.
Adelson had never intended to have Sweeney take the stand. However, when he had to throw out his psychiatric defense to keep the jurors from knowing about Sweeney’s previous acts of violence against Lillian Pierce, he had no choice but to put the accused on. Sweeney was abjectly courteous, addressing the lawyers and judge as sir. He spoke very quietly, and often had to be told to raise his voice so that the jurors could hear. Although he wept, he never once became flustered, and there was no sign of the rage he exhibited on the day Lillian Pierce took the stand. He painted his relationship with Dominique as nearly idyllic. He gave the names of all her animals—the bunny, the kitten, the puppy. He refuted the testimony of Bryan Cook and Denise Dennehy and denied that he had attempted to choke Dominique after their night on the town five weeks before the murder. He said he’d only tried to restrain her from leaving the house. He admitted they had separated after that, and that she had had the locks changed so that he could not get back in the house, but he insisted that she had promised to reconcile with him and that her refusal to do so was what brought on the final attack. He could not, he claimed, remember the events of the murder, which prompted Barshop to accuse him of having “selective memory.” After the attack, Sweeney said, he had entered the house and attempted to commit suicide by swallowing two bottles of pills; however, no bottles were ever found, and if he had swallowed pills, they did not have any apparent effect on his system.
From the beginning we had been warned that the defense would slander Dominique. It is part of the defense premise that the victim is responsible for the crime. As Dr. Willard Gaylin says in his book The Killing of Bonnie Garland, Bonnie Garland’s killer, Richard Herrin, murdered Bonnie all over again in the courtroom. It is always the murder victim who is placed on trial. John Sweeney, who claimed to love Dominique, and whose defense was that this was a crime of passion, slandered her in court as viciously and cruelly as he had strangled her. It was agonizing for us to listen to him, led on by Adelson, besmirch Dominique’s name. His violent past remained sacrosanct and inviolate, but her name was allowed to be trampled upon and kicked, with unsubstantiated charges, by the man who killed her.
“Look at her friends!” I wanted to scream at the judge and jury. “You have seen them both on the stand and in the courtroom: Bryan Cook, Denise Dennehy, Melinda Bittan, Kit McDonough, Erica Elliot, and the others who have been here every day—bright, clean-cut, successful young people. That is what Dominique Dunne was like. She wasn’t at all the person whom John Sweeney is describing.” But I sat silent.
When Dominique’s friends closed up her house after the funeral, her best friend, Melinda Bittan, came across a letter Dominique had written to Sweeney, which he may or may not have received. The letter had been filed away and forgotten. In the final days of the trial, Melinda remembered it one day when a group of us were having lunch together. Steven Barshop introduced it in his rebuttal, and as the court reporter, Sally Yerger, read it to the jury, it was as if Dominique was speaking from beyond the grave.
“Selfishness works both ways,” she wrote. “You are just as selfish as I am. We have to be two individuals to work together as a couple. I am not permitted to do enough things on my own. Why must you be a part of everything I do? Why do you want to come to my riding lessons and my acting classes? Why are you jealous of every scene partner I have?
“Why must I recount word for word everything I spoke to Dr. Black about? Why must I talk about every audition when you know it is bad luck for me? Why do we have discussions at 3 a.m. all the time, instead of during the day?
“Why must you know the name of every person I come into contact with? You go crazy over my rehearsals. You insist on going to work with me when I have told you it makes me nervous. Your paranoia is overboard.… You do not love me. You are obsessed with me. The person you think you love is not me at all. It is someone you have made up in your head. I’m the person who makes you angry, who you fight with sometimes. I think we only fight when images of me fade away and you are faced with the real me. That’s why arguments erupt out of nowhere.
“The whole thing has made me realize how scared I am of you, and I don’t mean just physically. I’m afraid of the next time you are going to have another mood swing.… When we are good, we are great. But when we are bad, we are horrendous. The bad outweighs the good.”
Throughout Steven Barshop’s closing argument to the jury, when he asked them to find Sweeney guilty of murder in the second degree, the maximum verdict available to them, Judge Katz sat with a bottle of correction fluid, brushing out lines on something he was preparing. Later we learned it was his instructions to the jury. I thought, if he isn’t listening, or is only half listening, what kind of subliminal signal is that sending to the jury? During Adelson’s final argument, on the other hand, he gave his full attention.
‘This will be the toughest day of the trial,” said Steven Barshop on the morning of Adelson’s final argument. “Today you will hear Adelson justify murder.” We had grown very close to Steven Barshop during the weeks of the trial and admired his integrity and honesty. “You don’t have to sit through it, you know,” he said. But we did, and he knew we would.
I lost count of how many times Adelson described Sweeney to the jury as an “ordinarily reasonable person,” as if this act of murder were an isolated instance in an ordinarily serene life. Every time he said it he separated the three words—ordinarily reasonable person—and underscored them with a pointing gesture of his hand. We who had seen every moment of the trial knew of thirteen separate instances of violence, ten against Lillian Pierce and three against Dominique, but the jurors at this point were still not even aware of the existence of Lillian Pierce. Through an informant at Ma Maison, our family also knew of other acts of violence against women that had not been introduced into the case, but we sat in impassive silence as Adelson described the strangler again and again as an ordinarily reasonable person.
He returned to his old theme: “This was not a crime,” he told the jury. “This was a tragedy.” It didn’t matter that he knew it wasn’t true. They didn’t know it wasn’t true, and he was only concerned with convincing them.
He talked about “that old-fashioned thing: romantic love.” He made up dialogue and put it in the mouth of Dominique Dunne. “I, Dominique, reject you Sweeney,” he cried out. “I lied to you Sweeney!”
We were sickened at his shamelessness. Leaving the courtroom during a break, I found myself next to him in the aisle. “You piece of sh*t,” I said to him quietly so that only he could hear.
His eyes flashed in anger. “Your honor!” he called out. “May I approach the bench?”
I continued out the corridor, where I told Lenny what I had done. “That was very stupid,” she said. “Now you’ll get kicked out of the courtroom.”
“No one heard me say it except Adelson,” I said. “When the judge calls me up, I’ll lie and say I didn’t say it. Everybody else is lying. Why shouldn’t I? It’s his word against mine.”
Steve Barshop appeared.
“Is he going to kick me out?” I asked.
Barshop smiled. “He can’t kick the father of the victim out of court on the last day of the trial with all the press present,” he said. Then he added, “But don’t do it again.”
Judge Katz drank soft drinks from Styrofoam cups as he read instructions to the jury explaining second-degree murder, voluntary manslaughter, and involuntary manslaughter. Later, after the sentencing, the jury foreman, Paul Spiegel, would say on television that the judge’s instructions were incomprehensible. During the eight days that the jury was out, dead-locked, they asked the judge four times for clarification of the instructions, and four times the judge told them that the answers to their questions were in the instructions.
I was now living in the Bel Air home of Martin Manulis, who had returned east after Katie’s death to complete post-production work on a new miniseries. The jury had been out for over a week, and we knew they could not understand the instructions. Lenny, Griffin, Alex, and I were terribly edgy, and one evening we all went our separate ways. I paced restlessly from room to room in the Manulis house. I hadn’t looked at television that summer except occasionally to see the news, but I suddenly picked up the remote-control unit and flicked the set on. I froze at the voice I heard.
There, on television, was Dominique screaming, “What’s happening?” I had not known that Poltergeist was scheduled on the cable channel, and the shock of seeing her was overwhelming. I felt as if she were sending me a message. “I don’t know what’s happening, my darling,” I screamed back at the television set, and for the first time since the trial started I sobbed. The next day the verdict came in.
The waiting was endless. Joseph Shapiro, the Ma Maison lawyer, regaled the reporters with an account of an African safari in the veldt where the native guides serving his party wore black tie. One of the courthouse groupies said that three buzzes to the clerk’s desk meant that a verdict had been reached. Five minutes before the jury entered, we watched Judge Katz sentence a man who had robbed a flower shop in a nonviolent crime to five years in prison. Sweeney entered, clutching his Bible, and sat a few feet away from us. Mrs. Sweeney sat across the aisle with Joseph Shapiro. The room was packed. A pool television camera, reporters, and photographers filled the aisles.
The jury entered, and the foreman, Paul Spiegel, delivered two envelopes to the bailiff to give to the judge. Katz opened first one envelope and then the other, milking his moment before the television camera like a starlet at the Golden Globes. Then, revealing nothing, he handed the two envelopes to his clerk, Velma Smith, who read the verdicts aloud to the court. The strangulation death of Dominique Dunne was voluntary manslaughter, and the earlier choking a misdemeanor assault. There was a gasp of disbelief in the courtroom. The maximum sentence for the two charges is six and a half years, and with good time and work time, the convict is paroled automatically when he has served half his sentence, without having to go through a parole hearing. Since the time spent in jail between the arrest and the sentencing counted as time served, Sweeney would be free in two and a half years.
“I am ecstatic!” cried Adelson. He embraced Sweeney, who laid his head on Adelson’s shoulder. Shapiro clutched Mrs. Sweeney’s hand in a victorious salute, but Mrs. Sweeney, of the lot of them, had the grace not to exult publicly that her son had got away with murder. Then Adelson and Shapiro clasped hands, acting as if they had freed an innocent man from the gallows. Not content with his victory, Adelson wanted more. “Probation!” he cried. As we sat there like whipped dogs and watched the spectacle of justice at work, I felt a madness growing within me.
Judge Katz excused the jury, telling them that even though other people might agree or disagree with the verdict, they must not doubt their decision. “You were there. You saw the evidence. You heard the witnesses.” He knew, of course, that they would be hearing from the press about Lillian Pierce in minutes.
He told them that justice had been served and thanked them on behalf of the attorneys and both families. I could not believe I had heard Judge Katz thank the jury on behalf of my family for reducing the murder of my daughter to manslaughter. Rage heated my blood. I felt loathing for him. The weeks of sitting impassively through the travesty that we had witnessed finally took their toll. “Not for our family, Judge Katz!” I shouted. Friends behind me put warning hands of caution on my shoulders, but reason had deserted me.
Katz looked at me, aghast, as if he were above criticism in his own courtroom.
“You will have your chance to speak at the time of the sentencing, Mr. Dunne,” he said.
“It’s too late then,” I answered.
“I will have to ask the bailiff to remove you from the courtroom,” he said.
“No,” I answered. “I’m leaving the courtroom. It’s all over here.”
I took Lenny’s wheelchair and pushed it up the aisle. The room was silent. At the double doors that opened onto the corridor, I turned back. My eyes locked with Judge Katz’s and I raised my hand and pointed at him. “You have withheld important evidence from this jury about this man’s history of violence against women.”
The jury foreman, when asked later by the press what finally broke the deadlock, replied on television, “A few jurors were just hot and tired and wanted to give up.”
The trial was over. Sentencing was set for November 10.
There was an uproar in the media over the verdict, and KABC radio ran an on-the-hour editorial blasting it. Letters of outrage filled the newspapers as stories of John Sweeney’s history of violence against women became public knowledge. The Herald Examiner published a front-page article about the case: “Heat of Passion: Legitimate Defense or a Legal Loophole?” Judge Katz was severely criticized. In the weeks that followed, a local television station released the results of a poll of prosecutors and criminal defense lawyers in which he tied for fourth-worst judge in Los Angeles County.
Several days after the verdict I returned to the courthouse to retrieve from the district attorney the photographs and letters and videotapes of television shows that Lenny had lent him. The receptionist said I would find Steve Barshop in one of the courtrooms. As I passed Courtroom D, out of habit I looked in the window. At that instant Judge Katz happened to look up. I moved on and entered Courtroom C, where Barshop was busy with another lawyer. The doors of the courtroom opened behind me, and Judge Katz’s bailiff, Paul Turner, who had wrestled Sweeney to the ground several months earlier, asked me to go out into the hall with him. “What are you doing here?” he asked me. He was stern and tough.
“What do you mean, what am I doing here?” I replied.
“Just what I said to you.”
“I don’t have the right to be here?”
“There’s been a lot of bad blood in this trial,” he said. I realized that he thought, or the judge thought, that I had come there to seek revenge. Then Steve Barshop came out into the corridor, and the bailiff turned and left us.
In the month between the verdict and the sentencing, we tried to pick up the pieces of our lives, but the aftermath of the trial continued. Joseph Shapiro appeared at the wrap party given by 20th Century-Fox for the film Johnny Dangerously, in which Griffin co-stars, and the producers asked him to leave the lot.
According to Proposition 8, the victim’s bill of rights, the next of kin of murder victims have the right to take the stand at the sentencing and plead with the judge for the maximum sentence. We were told that Adelson intended to cross-examine us if we did this. We were also told that Adelson, in order to get Sweeney released on probation that day, intended to put on the stand psychiatrists and psychologists who would testify that Sweeney was nonviolent. And we were told that Adelson intended to show a videotape of Sweeney under hypnosis saying he could not remember the murder.
On the day of the sentencing, pickets protesting the verdict, the judge, and Ma Maison marched and sang on the courthouse steps in Santa Monica. Courtroom D was filled to capacity. Extra bailiffs stood in the aisles and among the standees at the rear of the room. A young man called Gavin DeBecker sat next to the bailiff’s desk and made frequent trips back to the judge’s chambers. DeBecker provides bodyguard service for political figures and public personalities.
Throughout the several hours of the proceedings John Sweeney remained hunched over, his face covered by his hands, so unobtrusive a figure that he seemed almost not to be there.
Two of Sweeney’s sisters took the stand and asked for mercy for their brother. Mrs. Sweeney described her life as a battered and beaten wife. Griffin took the stand and presented Judge Katz with a petition that had been circulated by Dominique’s friends; it contained a thousand signatures of people protesting the verdict and asking for the maximum sentence. Lenny spoke, and I spoke.
We were not cross-examined by Adelson. No psychiatrists or psychologists took the stand. No videotape of Sweeney saying he could not remember the murder was shown. But a whole new dynamic entered Courtroom D that day and dominated everything else: the outrage of Judge Burton S. Katz over the injustice of the verdict arrived at by the jury.
He mocked the argument that Sweeney had acted in the heat of passion. “I will state on the record that I believe this is a murder. I believe that Sweeney is a murderer and not a manslaughterer.… This is a killing with malice. This man held on to this young, vulnerable, beautiful, warm human being that had everything to live for, with his hands. He had to have known that as she was flailing to get oxygen, that the process of death was displacing the process of life.”
Judge Katz then addressed Sweeney: “You knew of your capacity for uncontrolled violence. You knew you hurt Dominique badly with your own hands and that you nearly choked her into unconsciousness on September 26. You were in a rage because your fragile ego could not accept the final rejection.”
He said he was appalled by the jurors’ decision over Sweeney’s first attack: “The jury came back—I don’t understand for the life of me—with simple assault, thus taking away the sentencing parameters that I might have on a felony assault.”
He called the punishment for the crime “anemic and pathetically inadequate.” Having got the verdict we felt he had guided the jurors into giving, he was now blasting them for giving it.
He went on and on. It was as if he had suddenly become a different human being. However, all his eloquence changed nothing. The verdict remained the same: manslaughter. The sentence remained the same: six and a half years, automatically out in two and a half.
Surrounded by four bailiffs, Sweeney rose, looking at no one, and walked out of the courtroom for the last time. He was sent to the minimum-security facility at Chino.
Gavin DeBecker pursued us down the hall. He said Judge Katz would like to see me in his chambers. Lenny declined, but I was curious, as was Griffin. DeBecker led us to Katz’s chambers. “Burt,” he said, tapping on the door, “the Dunnes are here.”
Judge Katz was utterly charming. He called us by our first names. He talked at length about the injustice of the verdict and his own shock over it, as if all this were something in which he had played no part. He said his daughters had not spoken to him since the verdict came in.
He gave each of us his Superior Court card and wrote on it his unlisted telephone number at home and his private number in the chambers so that we could call him direct. What, I thought to myself, would I ever have to call him about?
Back in the crowded corridor again, I was talking with friends as Michael Adelson made his exit. He caught my eye, and I sensed what he was going to do. In the manner of John McEnroe leaping over the net in a moment of largesse to exchange pleasantries with the vanquished, this defender of my daughter’s killer made his way across the corridor to speak to me. I waited until he was very near, and as he was about to extend his hand I turned away from him.
When Michael Adelson was asked in an NBC television interview if he thought Sweeney would pose a threat to society when released from prison in two and a half years, he pondered and replied, “I think he will be safe if he gets the therapy he needs. His rage needs to be worked upon.” Judge Katz, when asked the same question by the same interviewer, answered, “I wouldn’t be comfortable with him in society.” Steven Barshop told a newspaper reporter, “He’ll be out in time to cook someone a nice dinner and kill someone else.” Paul Spiegel, the jury foreman, in a television interview, called the judge’s criticism of the verdict a cheap shot. He said the judge was concerned over the criticism he himself had received since the trial and was trying to place the blame elsewhere. Spiegel said he felt that justice had not been served. He said the jury would certainly have found Sweeney guilty if they had heard all the evidence. “If it were up to me,” he said, “Sweeney would have spent the rest of his life in jail.”
Not one of us regrets having gone through the trial, or wishes that we had accepted a plea bargain, even though Sweeney would then have had to serve seven and a half years rather than two and a half. We chose to go to trial, and we did, and we saw into one another’s souls in the process. We loved her, and we knew that she loved us back. Knowing that we did everything we could has been for us the beginning of the release from pain. We thought of revenge, the boys and I, but it was just a thought, no more than that, momentarily comforting. We believe in God and in ultimate justice, and the time came to let go of our obsession with the murder and proceed with life.
Alex decided to stay with his mother in California and finish his college education. Griffin had to return to New York to start a new film. Lenny became an active spokesperson for Parents of Murdered Children. I returned to the novel I was writing, which I had put aside at the beginning of the trial.
It was my last day in Los Angeles. I had said my farewells to all, knowing I had experienced new dimensions of friendship and family love. I was waiting for the car to drive me to the airport. Outside it was raining for the first time in months. Through the windows I could see the gardeners of the house where I had been staying in Bel Air. They were watering the lawn as usual, wearing yellow slickers in the insistent downpour.
There was plenty of time. I told the driver to take me to Crescent Drive first. I wanted to say good-bye to Lenny again. I knew what an effort it had been for her to put herself through the ordeal of the trial. She was in bed watching Good Morning America. I sat in her wheelchair next to her bed and held her hand. “I’m proud of you, Len,” I said to her. “I’m proud of you too,” she said to me, but she kept looking at David Hartman on television.
On the way out I took a yellow rose from the hall table.
“I want to make one more stop,” I said to the driver.
We went out Wilshire Boulevard to Westwood. Past the Avco theater complex, the driver made a left turn into the Westwood Cemetery.
“I’ll be just a few minutes,” I said.
Dominique is buried near two of her mother’s close friends, the actresses Norma Crane and Natalie Wood. On her marker, under her name and dates, it says “Loved by All.” I knelt down and put the yellow rose on her grave.
“Good-bye, my darling daughter.”
Dominick Dunne was a best-selling author and special correspondent for Vanity Fair.
