Dunne takes Seal Harbor center stage ‘Justice’ author has covered high-profile murder trials

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MOUNT DESERT – Murder, intrigue, high society and justice, and sometimes a lack of the latter, will be the center of discussion Monday night in the village of Seal Harbor. At the center of it will be Dominick Dunne, who is intimately familiar with it all.

So why Seal Harbor?

Dunne, well known for his coverage for Vanity Fair magazine of high-profile murder cases such as O. J. Simpson, Claus von Bulow, William Kennedy Smith and Erik and Lyle Menendez, is staying with Martha Stewart at her estate, Skylands.

“She’s a good pal of mine. We’ve been friends for a very long time. Besides that, it was really someone else’s idea. They point and that’s where I go. I am, however, glad to have the chance to be in Maine. I have many friends in Northeast Harbor,” said Dunne, speaking from his home in New York.

Dunne’s talk, from 6 to 7 p.m. Monday, Aug. 13, at the Church of Skylands on Main Street in Seal Harbor, is one stop on a tour promoting his latest book, “Justice.” Tickets for that talk are sold out. Proceeds will benefit the Seal Harbor Library.

Dunne also will be signing books from 11 a.m. to noon Tuesday, Aug. 14, at Port In A Storm Book Store in the Mount Desert village of Somesville.

Dunne, who has profiled Imelda Marcos, Robert Mapplethorpe, Elizabeth Taylor and Queen Noor of Jordan, will speak about his book and the many highly publicized murders that he has covered first-hand from the front row of the courtroom as a special correspondent for Vanity Fair.

“Surging reports on high-society murder cases, featuring some of the most seamy and venal behavior this side of Gomorrah,” is how the literary journal Kirkus Reviews describes Dunne’s work. “[Dunne] is scrupulously honest in his reporting and thorough. He also moves at a good clip, pulling readers along as though a hand had clasped their sleeve.”

While he has written about countless tragedies of other people, it was Dunne’s own personal one that launched his mid-life career as a writer and author.

With justice serving as the backdrop for all his writings, Dunne says it was the lack of justice in the 1982 slaying of his 22-year-old daughter, Dominique Dunne, that set him on his current path. His daughter, an actress who played the older sister in “Poltergeist” and appeared in various TV shows, was strangled to death by her boyfriend John Sweeney. Found guilty of manslaughter, Sweeney was sentenced to six and a half years in prison and released in less than three.

Out of that tragedy and anger and rage, which Dunne says “I never knew existed,” he found his calling and a career he truly loves.

Dunne used to be a Hollywood producer, producing movies such as “Ash Wednesday,” “Boys in the Band” and “Play It As It Lays.” After his daughter’s death, he became a bulldog, tapping out the atrocities he watched unfold in courtroom after courtroom. His true-life characters are almost always powerful and prestigious and an interest in the minutiae of their lives – and his insider knowledge of such – has propelled Dunne to the bestsellers’ list several times.

“You’ve got to write about the world you live in. I wouldn’t be much good at writing about street crime. This is the world I know and that’s why I write about it,” he said.

Dunne makes no excuses for the very biased slant that he adopts in his Vanity Fair columns, slugged “Dominick’s Diary.”

“I say just what I think right up front. I take sides right away. That’s not approved by most journalists and I could care less,” he says.

So, in Seal Harbor Dunne will talk about O.J. Simpson, the most frustrating case he’s ever written about; the murder trial of the Menendez brothers, he feels sorry for them, but only because of the senselessness of their act when they had so much going for them; and probably the upcoming trial of Michael Skakel, the Kennedy cousin charged with killing 15-year-old Martha Moxley in Greenwich, Conn. in 1975.

He’ll probably talk about the famous Claus von Bulow trial, the most interesting case he’s ever covered.

“I mean they held these lunch parties during the trial and I was invited and, of course, I never turned that down. But the callousness was unbelievable. I mean, here we are in the apartment of his comatose wife while he’s on trial for attempting to kill her. We’re drinking out of her glasses and waiters are serving us lobster salad and you think ‘This can’t be happening.'”

Dunne was invited despite his clear position on von Bulow’s guilt.

“They were trying to win me over. I was supposed to be dazzled by that. I wasn’t. I wrote about it and I suspect they are sorry they invited me. At least I hope they are,” he said.

So does he think that money can still usurp justice?

“Let me remind you,” he says matter-of-factly, “of O.J. Simpson and of the Ramseys. …Yes!”

And he adds, that victims still have too few rights and defendants too many.

So perhaps, Dunne may land in a Maine courtroom one day, should the case be interesting enough.

Perhaps, he says.

We may not have the prestige necessary to attract Dunne to one of our Maine murders.

He chuckles.

Well, unless, of course, it occurs in Northeast Harbor.

He laughs out loud, “Well, I hope it doesn’t, but if it does you can count on me being there.”