From Dominick Dunne wiki--

In November 1982, his daughter, Dominique Dunne, best known for her part in the film Poltergeist, was murdered by strangulation. Dominique's ex-boyfriend, John Thomas Sweeney, was arrested for the crime, and Dominick Dunne attended the subsequent trial. Sweeney was convicted of voluntary manslaughter and sentenced to six and a half years in prison, but he served only two and a half years of his sentence. Dunne's account of the experience, "Justice: A Father's Account of the Trial of his Daughter's Killer", ran in the March 1984 issue of Vanity Fair.[7]

Dunne started writing regularly for Vanity Fair. He based several bestselling novels on real events, including the murders of Alfred Bloomingdale's mistress, Vicki Morgan (An Inconvenient Woman), and banking heir William Woodward, Jr., who was shot by his wife, Ann Woodward (The Two Mrs. Grenvilles). He eventually hosted the TV series Dominick Dunne's Power, Privilege, and Justice on Court TV (later truTV), in which he discussed the justice and injustice of the intersection of celebrity and the judicial system. He covered the famous trials of O. J. Simpson, Claus von Bülow, Michael Skakel, William Kennedy Smith, and the Menendez brothers. The Library of America selected Dunne's account of the Menendez trial, Nightmare on Elm Drive, for inclusion in its two-century retrospective of American true crime writing, published in 2008.

In 2005, former California Congressman Gary Condit won an undisclosed financial settlement and an apology from Dunne,[8] who had earlier implicated him in the disappearance of Condit's intern Chandra Levy in Washington, D.C. Levy was from Condit's Congressional district, and Condit had previously admitted to an extramarital affair with her. As part of the settlement, Dunne issued a brief statement that it was not his intention “to imply that Mr. Condit was complicit in Levy’s disappearance." In November 2006, Condit again sued Dunne for comments Dunne made about him on Larry King Live on CNN.[9] This lawsuit was eventually dismissed.