Obsession (44 page)

But Sweeney wasn’t ready to give up. October 30, 1982, around eight-thirty at night, he had the operator interrupt a phone conversation between Dominique and a friend. Shortly after that, he showed up at her front door. At first, she left the chain on and spoke to him through the crack. But she was not alone that night—another young actor named David Packer was there to rehearse scenes with her—and that may have made her feel safe enough to open the door and go outside to talk with Sweeney.

From inside, Packer heard the sounds of a quarrel, screams, and a noise that frightened him enough to call the police, although he was told that he had called the wrong department; it was outside their jurisdiction.
He then called a friend to say that if anything happened to him, the police should look for John Sweeney. As Packer fled the house, he ran into Sweeney, who told him to call the police.

When they arrived, Sweeney told them he had killed Dominique and had then tried to kill himself, claiming he took pills in an overdose attempt. There was, however, no indication that he’d taken anything.

Dominique Dunne was taken to the hospital, where doctors were able to restart her heart. But she was only being kept alive mechanically. Five days later, with the realization that she was registering no brain function, her anguished family allowed doctors to remove her from life support. They donated her heart and kidneys.

When police arrested Sweeney, they found him remorseful—but not about killing his girlfriend. I’ve observed that many offenders are remorseful when arrested simply because they’re in custody. They mourn for themselves instead of their victim, and Sweeney went so far as to voice that concern to an arresting officer: “I fucked up. I can’t believe I did something that will put me behind bars forever…. I didn’t think I choked her that hard.”

If there was little reason to believe Sweeney felt remorse over killing Dominique Dunne, there was even less to believe elements of the story he told interrogating officers and, later, the court. At the trial, Sweeney claimed he and Dunne had made up days before he went to her house and even talked about getting married. There is no evidence of this. And his version of what happened on the porch suffers from gaps of logic similar to those in Robert Chambers’s story of how Jennifer Levin died. In his attempt to blame the victim, Sweeney claimed Dominique told him that night she’d been lying when she talked about
getting married and having a family, and she admitted she was just leading him on.

Sweeney’s reaction to her supposed lying, deceitful behavior: “I just exploded and lunged toward her.” According to Sweeney, he could not remember what happened next. At some point he realized he was on Dunne, his hands grasping her neck. When he found she wasn’t breathing, he said he tried to pick her up and get her to walk around, but she kept falling, so he tried doing CPR until they both threw up. He went inside, got two bottles’ worth of pills to kill himself, pulled her tongue away from her throat (presumably to clear her airway), and lay down next to her.

Now, the first thing I have to say is that this is absolute and total bullshit. As Linda Fairstein noted in the Chambers-Levin case, it takes at least a few long moments to strangle someone to death. Strangulation victims stop resisting well before they actually die, so Sweeney had ample time to realize what he was doing and release her. Three experts called to evaluate the case said he had time to let up on his grasp so Dunne could have recovered. The coroner testified that it had taken between four and six minutes to strangle Dominique to death. Prosecutor Steve Barshop held up his watch for four solid minutes in court so that the jury could get a sense of how long that was and how much time Sweeney had to let go had he wanted to.

Sweeney’s claim that he didn’t remember anything about that part of the assault also doesn’t match his comments to police and is an often-invoked defense ploy. Saying, “I didn’t think I choked her that hard. I just kept on choking her,” indicates he was at least partly aware of what he was doing.

In preparation for the trial, investigators found that he’d been through the same type of relationship with another woman between 1977 and 1980—although she
was more fortunate than Dominique Dunne; she escaped with her life. John Sweeney was a classic abuser. Just as love-obsession stalkers keep to their obsessive behavior but may find other people to fixate on, domestic abusers and simple obsession stalkers often exhibit the same patterns in other relationships. Sweeney’s first victim, a secretary, told the prosecution she’d been beaten by him no fewer than ten times and been hospitalized twice, including one occasion when she ended up with a collapsed lung and a perforated eardrum. Barshop tried to have the woman’s testimony admitted as evidence, but Sweeney’s court-appointed defense attorney, Michael Adelson, was able to get Judge Burton Katz to exclude it as more prejudicial than probative. The judge also ruled that Dominique’s mother’s testimony about the time Dominique came to her house after Sweeney beat her also could not be used for the same reason, and that anything Dominique had said in the last five weeks of her life to her friends and fellow actors about her fear of Sweeney was also not admissible because it was hearsay.

In other words, anything that pointed to the fact that Sweeney was a dangerous, habitual abuser who had given his victim reason to fear for her life would be prejudicial to the jury. And in the most stunning—and to me, inexplicable—ruling of all, Judge Katz agreed with a defense assertion that only charges of second-degree murder or manslaughter could be considered. In effect, this was saying that in those four to six minutes that he squeezed the life out of Dominique Dunne, John Sweeney had not legally formed the intent to kill her!

Writing in
Cosmopolitan
magazine after the trial, Dominick Dunne wrote, “It is always the murder victim who is placed on trial. John Sweeney, who claimed to have loved 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.”

What the jury heard was a defense that the killing occurred in the “heat of passion” after Dominique confessed her lies. In other words, blame the victim for her murder. In his closing statement, Michael Adelson kept referring to his client as an “ordinarily reasonable person.” What exactly did he mean by that—that Sweeney was a normal, okay guy except for those times when he was beating or strangling a woman in a violent rage?

The jury—which never learned of Sweeney’s pattern of violence in his other relationship—was deadlocked for eight days before finally finding him guilty of voluntary manslaughter.

The verdict set off a firestorm of public outrage, during which time Judge Katz—whose rulings often favored the defense throughout the trial to the consternation of the prosecution—apparently thought it prudent to scramble to the opposite shore.

So at sentencing, while the defense tried pleading for leniency amounting to probation, Judge Katz, who had previously commended the jury by saying they’d “served justice well,” wouldn’t go for it. This time, he excoriated the jury and their verdict, saying, “I don’t understand it for the life of me.” I suspect Dominick and Lenny Dunne didn’t understand it for the life of their daughter, either.

“This is a case of murder, pure and simple,” Katz piously intoned before imposing the maximum allowable sentence of six and a half years. Compare that with a minimum of fifteen if he’d been found guilty
of second-degree murder, or the potential life sentence for first This is what the law says an innocent life is worth under these circumstances.

As it was, the sentence meant Sweeney need not serve more than two and a half years, given credit for time he had already served and with more time off for good behavior. He was sent to the California minimum-security correctional facility at Chico.

Steve Barshop commented, “He’ll be out in time to cook someone a nice dinner and kill someone else.”

The jurors, for their part, were dumbfounded. The foreman said Katz’s criticisms were a cheap shot and that if they had heard all the evidence, they certainly would have found Sweeney guilty of murder. He stated that he felt justice had not been served.

As often it is not served in such cases, I’m afraid.

Once she’d seen his violent side and realized that he was not going to change, Dominique Dunne was sufficiently fearful of John Sweeney to end their relationship. She’d met him about a year after he’d split up with his former victim. In a more perfect world, he would have still been behind bars for what he did to her and wouldn’t have had the opportunity to meet, much less murder, Dominique.

After serving the mandatory part of the sentence imposed by Judge Katz, John Sweeney was released from prison and began living under a new name—a new lease on life, so to speak. Dominique Dunne, it need hardly be added, is still dead.

When Sweeney went to her house that fatal night, though, she wasn’t in fear for her life or she would never have gone outside to talk. She did nothing wrong. When it came to protecting herself, she simply did not know that more was required than breaking up with him, getting him out of her house, and changing her locks.

Her sad naïveté was no match for his desperate cunning.
Obviously, she wanted nothing more to do with him, but at one point she’d been in love with this man. He was skillful and manipulative enough to play on her compassion, her vulnerability, and her inexperience in dealing with people like him to get her to open the door. When she went out on the porch, she was probably attempting what many victims try: negotiation. Like others, Dunne probably hoped she could get him to leave her alone without causing further trouble. She didn’t realize that you can’t reason with someone like that—not at that stage.

We talked in the last chapter about the love-obsession stalkers who can be reasoned with: those who are rooted enough in reality that early threat of criminal charges and jail time or other punishment, plus potential loss of everything else in their life—job, home, relationships—may halt the stalking behavior. Unfortunately, these conditions are not present for most simple obsession stalkers. For one thing, they usually get away with abusive behavior for so long before they get in any trouble that the threat of police intervention isn’t real to them. And when they are punished, it is typically not severe enough to make them change their ways. Domestic abuse crimes are still typically misdemeanors, so the offender knows that even if he can’t get out of it, he won’t be doing serious time. And if a victim does get law enforcement involved in what the offender perceives as her personal problem (it’s definitely not his problem, in his mind), that just serves to make him angrier. She’s not only disobeying and being disloyal, now she’s hassling him with the law and causing him more trouble.

By the time a woman leaves an abuser, the two of them have often been through the cycle of courtship, intimidation, and violence more than once. It’s almost as though they’re both programmed in their roles. This is partly why it’s so threatening to the abuser when
the victim breaks the pattern. He doesn’t like her to call any play changes—that’s up to him—and he doesn’t like the play she’s called. It’s a double threat. John Sweeney was angry that he couldn’t control Dominique in their relationship, but it was even more threatening to his fragile ego that she could be the one to end the relationship. Nothing she could have said or done would have made the terms of their breakup acceptable to him.

Gavin de Becker has observed the futility of trying to reason with a delusional love-obsession celebrity stalker: “My basic philosophy is, you do not talk straight to crooked people…. A guy who has just left his wife, stolen a car, and driven three thousand miles because he get a message from Jesus that he should have a relationship with a famous singer doesn’t have a whole helluva lot to lose. Do you think he’ll end his trip [because] someone told him, ‘You really have to leave her alone?’”

I think the same theory applies to guys who have a history of abusing the women in their lives. It’s the pattern of behavior Stanton Samenow talks about, and it’s the way underlying insecurities were expressed in the behavior and personality of every offender I niter-viewed in prison. Whether he’s a sadistic serial killer who tortures and rapes children because he enjoys it, or a repeat domestic abuser who takes out his problems on the women in his life, he does what he does because it’s who he is, and you won’t be able to talk him out of it. On the contrary, if you are his victim, just by making yourself accessible to him you’ve given him a victory: he’s regained a measure of control.

When Dominique Dunne walked outside that door, although she certainly didn’t realize it, she weakened her position and strengthened Sweeney’s. In giving even an inch, she inadvertently reinforced to him why he needed her in his life. Talking to him at all accomplished
exactly the opposite of what she was trying to do.

To understand the complex dynamics of the situation, put yourself in her shoes. If someone came to your door and you went outside to tell him you didn’t want to see him ever again, you wouldn’t mean it as any sort of backhanded encouragement. You’re only out there as a courtesy, trying not to be hurtful. It’s like Laura Black first insisting she just wanted to be friends with Richard Farley.

But to understand the serial abuser/stalker, you have to walk in his shoes. And from his perspective, he sees that you don’t want to be with him, yet you went outside anyway. He was able to make you do what he wanted. You had to acknowledge him. So your words don’t turn him away. As Gavin and David Beatty have both pointed out, these are yellow lights he sees, not red. When he finally senses that you really mean “red,” the only way he can handle it is by dealing an ultimatum of his own—in Dominique Dunne’s case, that was death.