Friday, Nov. 19, 1999 | 11:16 a.m.
Best-selling author Dominick Dunne, while he was in town covering the du Pont murder trial, said the case has all the classic elements of a first-rate story.
Dunne, who has covered the trials of O.J. Simpson, the Menendez brothers, William Kennedy Smith, Claus von Bulow and other high-profile people, is covering the trial of Ricardo Murillo for Vanity Fair magazine.
Murillo is one of four people indicted in the August 1998 strangulation death of Patricia Margello.
While Margello and Murillo are a far cry from the people who normally inspire Dunne to pick up his pen, fate connected the pair to one of the richest families in America -- the du Ponts.
At the time of Margello's death she was dating Dean MacGuigan, son of Lisa Dean Moseley, whose mother was the great, great, granddaughter of Eleuthere Irenee du Pont de Nemours, founder of the Du Pont chemical corporation. The corporation has 165 manufacturing and processing plants in 70 countries and generated $24.8 billion in revenues last year, according to the Du Pont web page.
Dunne's fascination isn't limited to the elegant genealogy. Moseley's husband, Christopher, confessed he hired Murillo and two others to murder Margello. He testified he didn't approve of the drug-addicted prostitute's relationship with MacGuigan.
"I've been interested in the case from the first day I read about it," Dunne said. "I used to vaguely know Lisa Dean Moseley and her first husband, the father of Dean MacGuigan, E. Haring Chandor. They were very colorful characters in New York in the 1950s."
Dunne, 74, didn't start out as a journalist and novelist. He spent nearly 25 years working and playing in Hollywood alongside such people as Frank Sinatra, Paul Newman and Elizabeth Taylor. He was a stage manager for TV's "Howdy Doody" show and later worked as a TV and film producer.
According to his latest book, "The Way We Lived Then (Recollections of a Well-Known Name Dropper)," Dunne began his second career as a novelist when he was shunned by those in the Hollywood scene because of his problems with alcohol and drugs.
The 1982 murder of his daughter, actress Dominique Dunne, who that year had a starring role in the movie "Poltergeist," proved to be a pivotal point in Dunne's life. A friend of his from Vanity Fair had suggested he keep a journal throughout the trial and in it he vented his agony when the murderer was sentenced to only six years and ended up serving only 2 1/2 years.
His experience was recounted in an article he authored for Vanity Fair. Its headline read "Justice."
"It never occurred to me that I'd write about it, but I just got angrier and angrier and I decided that yes, I will write about it," Dunne said.
Since that time and in between writing novels, Dunne has written several magazine articles, picking and choosing among the nation's high-profile murder cases.
"There's something utterly fascinating about the rich and famous in a criminal situation," Dunne said. "I've built my whole career on it."
The du Pont murder trial has been compelling because of the dichotomy between Margello and MacGuigan and Moseley and Diana Hironaga, Dunne said.
Hironaga confessed she was the one who introduced Moseley to Murillo, lured Margello to the scene of her death and held her down while Murillo allegedly strangled her.
Dunne said he was amazed that despite his military background, Moseley chose Hironaga -- a drug-addicted prostitute and former porn star he had just met -- to carry out the crime.
"It was so alcoholic, so utterly alcoholic," Dunne said. "This was the rich behaving at their very worst in every way."
Another fascinating aspect of this case involved the prosecutors -- Tom O'Connell, Peter Ko and Matthew Parrella, Dunne said.
"I liked seeing what happened here," Dunne said. "Despite the bucks involved, there was no special consideration given. If it had been in Delaware there would have been."
Dunne was particularly impressed with Ko, who had the arduous task during closing arguments of combining Hironaga's statement with hundreds of phone calls made by everybody in the case and presenting to the jury a compelling argument about the conspiracy.
"He's as good as I've seen, especially for such a young guy," Dunne said. "There was no fumbling over notes during his closing argument, he just talked. This guy's going to be a star."
Dunne, who plans to come back to Las Vegas from New York for Moseley's sentencing, is winding down his book tour for "The Way We Lived Then" and planning a new novel.
"I'm never going to retire, I love my work, I love what I do. I love traveling to all of these places," Dunne said.
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