In July of 1982, the movie Poltergeist was released in theaters and was a runaway success. As one of it’s stars, Dominique Dunne’s career began to take off. In October of 1982, 22 year old Dominique was beginning to prepare for her next role and was looking forward to her career’s growth off the success of Poltergeist. Her boyfriend however, wasn’t able to handle his jealousy and anger at her new found attention, and Dominique would ultimately pay for that with her life.
who was dominique Dunne?
Dominique Dunne was born in Santa Monica, California in November of 1959. Her mother, Ellen “Lenny” Griffin Dunne was the heiress to a ranching empire in Arizona when she met Dominick Dunne, Dominique’s father. When they met, Dominick was a writer, actor, and producer. Dominick worked on television and film and was credited as a producer or executive producer on several projects.
Not long after Dominick and Ellen married, they decided to move to Beverly Hills. They had four children, Griffin and Alex, and two daughters who died in infancy. Their fifth child was young Dominique. Ellen said after her birth, “I’ve never been so excited and happy in my life. I’ve always wanted a little girl.”
When Dominique was still a child, Ellen and Dominick got a divorce, and Dominique went to live with her mother. Although she lived with her mother, she remained close with her father as well. Since her mother came from money, and her father was a successful writer / producer, their family was fairly well off, and Dominique would attend exclusive, private schools throughout her life. It was at one of these schools, Fountain Valley High School in Colorado, where Dominique discovered an interest in acting after she won a drama award.
After high school, Dominique decided to go to Italy for a year so she could study Italian by immersing herself in the language and culture. During this year away however, Dominique’s mom, Ellen, was diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis. Devastated by this diagnosis, Dominique cut her stay in Italy short and returned home to be with her mother. It was during this time with her mother that Dominique decided that she wanted to give acting a serious shot, and enrolled at Colorado State University to study drama.
While there, she met Kent Adams, who said that Dominique was a bit of a fish out of water at CSU. Her family was wealthy, and she came from Hollywood and you could just tell that she was different. She was amongst all these “hicks,” according to Adams, but when she got on the stage, she was right at home and fit right in. After only a year at CSU though, Dominique decided that she wanted to go back to Hollywood and see if she could make this acting thing work.
When she arrived back in Hollywood, she reached out to a family friend, producer Charlie Wessler. Wessler had been a friend of the family through Dominique’s older brother who is also an actor, Griffin. He had known Dominique since she was six years old. Knowing that she was talented, Wessler immediately set Dominique up with a casting director. After meeting with her, that casting director set up a meeting with Nicole David, a very well known agent at the time. After meeting with Dominique, Nicole David sent her out for auditions, and within a week or two, Dominique had booked her first job.
Dominique was able to book several jobs, including a starring role in a made for TV movie, “The Haunting of Harrington House.” Although she had seen some early success and was working hard, Dominique knew that there was more she could be doing. She enrolled in an acting workshop given by Milton Katselas. Over the years, Katselas has had many students, including Gene Hackman, Alec Baldwain, Giovanni Ribisi, Jenna Elfman, Michelle Pfeiffer, and the list goes on and on. At the time, Katselas was a scientologist, and some students said that looking back, there was definitely pressure to join the church while there. Later in life, Katselas made a break from the organization, and lost several students who were still members of the church.
These workshops were also attended by actor Miguel Ferrer, who said they were pretty intense. “It was very straightforward, twice a week, four hours a night. It would be scene study, none of this ‘be a tree’ nonsense.” Students would do scenes from various plays as part of the workshop, and Dominique received praise from everyone for doing a scene from The Miracle Worker, about Helen Keller. While she was going to these workshops and continuing to audition, Dominique got another leading role in a TV movie, “Diary of a Teenage Hitchhiker.” Off of the strength of her performance in that, Dominique got the role of the eldest daughter in the upcoming Steven Spielberg produced horror movie, Poltergeist.
A Brief Detour About Poltergeist
Synopsis: Poltergeist is the story of a young family that is visited by ghosts in their home. At first, the ghosts appear to be friendly, moving objects around the house to the amusement of everyone. Then, they turn nasty and start to terrorize the family before they “kidnap” their youngest daughter.
Some people claim that Poltergeist was a cursed film franchise. There were four deaths associated with the cast during or around the shooting of the series. Obviously, the case we’re talking about today is one of the deaths. And there were two others that were a little more predictable and not mysterious. Actor Julien Beck was in Poltergeist II, and in 1983 was diagnosed with stomach cancer and died shortly after filming the movie. Will Sampson was also in Poltergeist II and died after complications arose from a heart and lung transplant.
Heather O’Rourke played the character “Carol Anne Freeling,” the younger sister of Domonique’s “Dana Freeling.” Heather was six years old when the first Poltergeist was released and immediately won the hearts of audiences. In 1987 however, she became ill and was mis-diagnosed as having Crohn’s Disease. A year later, when she fell ill again, her symptoms were written off as being the flu. A day later, she collapsed and went into cardiac arrest and was airlifted to a children’s hospital in San Diego. Once there, she was taken into surgery to correct a bowel obstruction. She died during that surgery, and it was later discovered that she had been suffering from a congenital intestinal abnormality, which caused her to go into septic shock when it was undiagnosed for so long.
People claimed that the series was cursed because during filming, Steven Spielberg insisted on using actual human skeletons as props to save money and time. It would have taken more time to make fake skeletons than to actually get real human remains. These claims have never been proven or confirmed. It was also said that during filming, actor Will Sampson performed an authentic exorcism after shooting wrapped one night. Sampson was the actor who later died during the heart / lung transplant.
So, there were deaths surrounding the series, 2 of them not really unexpected, given the people’s conditions. The other 2 were definitely out of the blue, which contributed to much of the lore surrounding the Poltergeist series.
John Thomas Sweeney
In 1981, before the release of Poltergeist and her launch into stardom, Domonique and some friends decided that instead of going out to celebrate a birthday, they would throw their own party. It was during this party that Dominique met John Sweeney. She was quickly attracted to Sweeney, despite the differences in their upbringings. Where Dominique grew up in a privileged, affluent family, Sweeney grew up in the coal mining town of Hazelton, Pennsylvania as the oldest of 6 children in a poor, Irish Catholic family.
Sweeney’s father, John Sr., was a factory worker, at the local beryllium plant and his mother, Maura, was a waitress. It was widely known by friends and neighbors that John Sr. had a drinking problem and was abusive to his wife and children. John Sr. would get loaded, then start to beat his wife. When this would happen, John Jr. would step in and try to defend his mother, resulting in his father directing his rage at him instead. This went on for years.
During high school, John decided that he needed to do something to get out of their town and better himself. He was attracted to cooking and the food industry and decided that he wanted to become a chef. After high school, he enrolled at the local community college and studied culinary arts. After he graduated, he got a job at a local restaurant, Carmen’s. The owner of the restaurant remembers that when John started, he could see right away that he was too talented to stay in their small town, and that it wouldn’t take him long to move on to bigger and better things. Co-worker’s at the time said that it was clear that he had talent, but his temper was also evident. Sweeney was a fairly large person. He also was interested in martial arts and would take self defense classes offered in their small town.
In 1976, John decided to move to Los Angeles and try to get a job there. Once there, John got a job at “Ma Maison.” Ma Maison was, at the time, one of the most exclusive restaurants in the country. Celebrities were constantly in and out of the dining room, and the executive chef at the time when John was hired was none other than a 25 year old Wolfgang Puck.
Other chef’s said that the kitchen of Ma Maison was the most pressure packed kitchen they’d ever worked in and the atmosphere was “intense” because you were under the gun constantly.
When he was first there, John shined in the kitchen. He got along with everyone fairly well, but he did have a temper. Not much thought was given to his temper however, because it was a pretty common trait in the restaurant industry. While John was at Ma Maison, the skills he showed made him stand out amongst his peers. So much so that the restaurant owner decided to send him to the south of France for a year to study cuisine and refine his skills. Upon his return to the states and Ma Maison in 1981, Wolfgang Puck left the restaurant to open his own, “Spago.” After Puck’s departure, John was given the executive chef position.
John & Dominique
After he became the executive chef at Ma Maison, John and Dominique met and quickly began to date. From outside, it was said that they had a great deal of infatuation towards one another, and that they seemed happy together. Dominique’s friend, Gloria Gifford, said that from the beginning, John swept her off her feet. He was 100% zoned in on her from the minute he saw her. Miguel Ferrer said that the first time he met John, he thought he was a nice guy. He was generous, charming, and funny. He seemed to care about Dominique a lot and was attentive to her.
After the couple had only been together for a few months, they decided to move in together and moved into a cozy 2 bedroom house. While Dominique was very happy moving in with John, her family friend, Charlie Wessler thought differently of him when they met. Wessler said that when he met John that John seemed like he was “putting all of his niceness” up front and forcing it upon you. He seemed phony and fake.
As their relationship progressed, Dominique brought John to New York to meet her father and brothers. While they were there, they would go out to nice restaurants every night and generally just have a good time together. One night, they went to “Lutece” (Lou-Tess), one of the finest restaurants in New York. As a “professional courtesy,” they were given everything completely free and treated as VIP guests because of John being the Head Chef at Ma Maison back on the West Coast. Dominique loved being able to “show John off” in this way.
It was also on this New York trip that John began showing a different side. One day while they were at lunch, a fan of the movie Poltergeist was at the bar. When he saw Dominique, he went up and started to talk to her. When John saw this, he rushed the guy and picked him up and shook him violently. It was also around this time that Gloria Gifford began to notice a change. She said that she saw that John never wanted Dominique to do anything alone, and he started to pull her away and try to isolate her.
John also thought that Dominique was sleeping with other people, although he had no reason to. He thought that she was having an affair with her acting coach. When Dominique got a role in the movie “The Shadow Riders” opposite Tom Selleck and Sam Elliott, John told her that she shouldn’t take it. His jealousy aside, John also had a drinking problem that progressed further and further. After a few drinks, he was unable to really control his anger or emotions and would often fly into a rage over the littlest things. As a result, they began to fight frequently, and John became physically abusive.
On August 27th 1982, Dominique showed up to her mother’s house, crying hysterically. She told her mother that they had been fighting, and that John hit her head against the floor and pulled out handfuls of her hair. John showed up and began to bang on the doors and windows, demanding to be let in. Ellen Dunne told John to leave and threatened to call the police. Eventually, John left. Two day later though, John showed up with flowers apologizing, and he and Dominique reconciled.
On Sept 26th, Dominique had a friend, Brian Cook and his girlfriend, Denise, in town visiting from Chicago. They all went out to dinner at Ma Maison and then to a local bar for drinks. They then returned home and had a few more drinks. A little while later, they said their good nights and went to bed. Brian and Denise stayed on a sofa bed while Dominique and John went to their bedroom. A short time later, Brian and Denise heard Dominique yelling for help and making a choking sound. Brian went to the door and told them to knock it off and they would settle it in the morning.
A short while later, they heard Dominique yelling for help again. Brian went to the bedroom and saw John pulling a chair in front of the door. A few minutes later, Dominique and John came out and Dominique showed marks and bruises on her neck where she had been choked. She asked John if she could go to the bathroom, and he said yes. A few minutes later, Brian, John, and Denise heard Dominique’s VolksWagon startup. John immediately ran out and jumped on the hood and held onto the windshield wipers as she drove away. About a block down the road, she stopped and he jumped off and walked back to their home.
Dominique went to a friend’s house and stayed the night. The next morning, the friend took pictures of the bruising on Dominique’s face and neck. In the photos she was laughing because the friend said she wouldn’t need makeup for an audition that day. She was auditioning to play a battered teen in Hill Street Blues. She ended up getting the part, and the bruising was so bad during filming that she in fact didn’t need makeup.
After that attack, Dominique moved out of the house and went into hiding. She wouldn’t tell any friends where she was, for fear that John would find out and stalk her. She reached out to Gloria Gifford and told her that they were splitting up, and that she planned on moving back into the house after John moved out. She had told John that they might be able to reconcile if he attended therapy and anger management classes. Eventually, John moved out, but Dominique never felt safe enough to move back in. John would show up to her weekly acting classes and wait outside for her to show up. When she saw him outside, she never went into the class.
In mid October, she reached out to a locksmith to have the locks changed on the house. She told him that she was afraid of her ex-boyfriend and that she didn’t feel safe. As he was changing the locks, John drove by in his car. The day after she had the locks changed, Dominique began working on a new project, the tv mini-series “V.” While on set, the director asked her if everything was ok, and she just said she was having trouble with a boyfriend.
the attack
On October 25th, Dominique moved back into the house that the couple had shared. She wrote Sweeney a letter stating that she needed more time and needed to go more slowly in rebuilding their relationship. She asked him to give her more time, but he didn’t want to wait. He began to go to therapy and told friends that they were going to get back together. He was optimistic, but Dominique had made her mind up and was not going to get back together with him again.
On the day before Halloween, John made a present for Dominique. He hand molded a chocolate mask in her likeness and carved some pumpkins for her. He had them delivered to her house and waited at the restaurant for a call from her. She called and told him that their relationship was over. He tried to call her back but she didn’t answer. He called his therapist and told him that he was losing it and wasn’t able to control himself. He continued to try to call Dominique, but she didn’t answer or return his calls. She did call one of her friends though and try to talk through everything. While on that call, the operator broke in and said that she had an emergency call from John and asked Dominique if she wanted to take it.
Dominique took the call and John asked if he could come over repeatedly, but she told him no. While they were on the call, there was a knock at the door, and it was David Packer, an actor friend, who came over to rehearse some scenes they were going to be in together. John heard this, and that’s all it took for him to head over to Dominique’s house.
John knocked on the door, and Dominique opened the door, but left the safety chain on the door. Packer saw John at the door and asked Dominique if he should leave. John said he would appreciate that, but Dominique told him not to leave and just wait inside the house. Dominique went out on the front porch with John. A few minutes later, David said he heard thumping and arguing from the front porch. The thumping was John banging his fist on the window seal. At this point, Packer went to the phone and called a friend, who didn’t answer. Packer left a message on the answering machine saying, “If I die tonight, John Sweeney did it.”
Next, he went back to the living room and began reading his script. As this was going on, he could hear John yelling and Dominique crying.
John lunged at Dominique and grabbed her by the throat as they both toppled over the porch railing into some bushes. From there, he grabbed her tighter by the throat and drug her to the neighbors driveway and down it, about 50-60 yards. Packer looked out the peep hole but didn’t see anyone there, but he heard Dominique screaming. He grabbed the phone and called the police. When he told the first officer he talked to what was going on, that officer said that if he was any type of a man, he would go outside and help Dominique if she was in fact in trouble.
A few minutes later, the police still hadn’t arrived. Packer snuck out the back door and looked at the neighbor’s yard. He saw John kneeling over Dominique’s body. John told Packer to call the police because he had committed a terrible crime. Packer called them again, but quickly left the house before they arrived, fearing for his life. John stayed by Dominique’s body and tried to give her CPR. When Sheriff’s arrived, he walked to them with his hands up and said, “I killed my girlfriend, and I want to kill myself.”
Police quickly arrested John, as officers rushed to Dominique. They started CPR and got a pulse when her heart started beating again. Five minutes later, an ambulance arrived and rushed her to Cedars Sinai Hospital. She was unconscious, but alive and placed on life support. She remained in a coma but was brain dead. On Nov. 4th, her family made the decision to remove her from life support.
The Trial & Aftermath
Upon his arrest, Sweeney was charged with attempted murder. After Dominique’s death, that was changed to first degree murder. He pleaded not guilty. He would later be charged with assault with intent to do bodily harm after he admitted that they had a physical altercation earlier in September.
During the trial, Sweeney took the stand in his own defense. He claimed that he never intended to harm Dominique. He said that they had reconciled and were talking to each other daily about getting married and starting a family. When he went to her house that night, she told him that she had been lying and had no intention of getting back together. He claimed that when she told him that, he just “exploded and lunged towards her.” He also claimed that he didn’t remember anything about the attack.
The next thing he remembered was “coming to” on top of her with his hands on her throat, when he realized she wasn’t breathing. He said that next, he attempted to revive her by making her walk around, but she collapsed. He attempted CPR, but that caused her to vomit, which caused him to vomit. Next, he claimed that he went into her house and downed two bottles of pills to try to kill himself. Then, he went back to her body and laid down beside her. His attorney said that his actions were not premeditated or done in malice, but was in fact a “heat of passion” attack.
The Dunne family disputed Sweeney’s claim that the couple had gotten back together. They said that he went to her home that night after she had already told him they weren’t getting back together. The prosecution and police dismissed his claims as well, since there was no evidence to support his claim of attempting suicide via taking pills. The first officer on the scene testified that Sweeney told 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.”
The medical examiner who did the autopsy said that it would have taken at least three minutes of strangling to kill Dominique. The prosecution claimed that this was ample time for Sweeney to “come to his senses,” and that the “heat of passion” defense shouldn’t even be considered.
The prosecution also attempted to show a pattern of violence and abuse from Sweeney. They called one of his ex-girlfriends to the stand. At the request of Sweeney’s attorney, she did not testify in front of the jury. She said that they had dated on and off for 2-3 years. In that time, he had physically attacked her 10 different times, hospitalizing her twice, once with a collapsed lung. During her testimony, Sweeney became angry and jumped up from his seat. He ran towards a door leading to the judge’s chambers, where he was subdued by two bailiffs and four armed guards. He was handcuffed to his chair and began to cry. He apologized to the judge, and Judge Burton S. Katz accepted the apology.
Sweeney’s lawyer then requested that the judge rule the ex-girlfriend’s testimony inadmissible because it was “prejudicial.” Judge Katz granted the request and the jury never heard the testimony until after the trial. Katz also refused to allow testimony from Dominique’s mom and her friends about the past abuse in the relationship because it was “hearsay.”
Sweeney’s defense next asked that Judge Katz to rule that there was not enough evidence in the case to prove premeditation or deliberation, so proving first degree murder wasn’t possible. Again, Judge Katz agreed and granted the request. He told the jurors that they were only allowed to consider charges of manslaughter or second degree murder. This decision along with the decisions to not allow Sweeney’s ex-girlfriend’s testimony or Dominique’s friends / family were giant blows to the prosecution’s case.
On September 21st, 1983, the jury acquitted Sweeney on the second degree murder charge but found him guilty of voluntary manslaughter after 8 days of deliberation. He was also convicted of misdemeanor assault for the September 26th attack on Dominique.
Dominique’s family called it an injustice. When Judge Katz excused the jury and told them that justice was served, Dominick Dunne yelled, “Not for our family, Judge Katz!” Before he left the courtroom, he also accused Judge Katz of purposely withholding Sweeney’s ex-girlfriend’s testimony from the jury which would have helped to establish his violent history with women.
On November 7th, Sweeney was sentenced to six years in prison for manslaughter, plus an additional six months for the assault charge. When the sentencing was read out, Judge Katz said that he felt like Dominique’s death was “a pure and simple case of murder. Murder with malice.” The jury’s foreman said that they were confused by the judge’s words… since he pretty much limited what they could convict Sweeney of and really limited what they even heard. It’s hard to believe that if they had heard all the testimony, that they wouldn’t have convicted him of first degree murder, if they were given the option to.
John Sweeney served three years and seven months of his sentence and was then released. Three months later, he became the head chef at an upscale restaurant in Santa Monica. Dominique’s mom and brother Griffin sat outside the restaurant and handed out fliers that read, “The food you will eat tonight was cooked by the hands that killed Dominique Dunne.” Eventually, Sweeney left this job and moved away from Los Angeles.
Dominick Dunne was contacted by a doctor in Florida in the mid 90s. This doctor had a daughter who was engaged to a John Sweeney and he wanted to know if it was the same man. They confirmed that it was the same John Sweeney who killed Dominique. Griffin called the daughter and tried to convince her to call off the engagement, but she didn’t. Sweeney claimed that the Dunne family was following him around and harassing him. Dominick hired a private investigator to follow Sweeney around. Sweeney moved to the Pacific Northwest and changed his name to John Maura. Eventually though, Dominick decided that he didn’t want to squander his life following Sweeney around.
After his release, John spoke about everything, saying:
“I think the time served is irrelevant in comparison to the fact that I’m doing life without (possibility of parole) in my heart. There’s no parole for that. It will be there every day. . . . In comparison to starting over and putting my life back, I’d say prison was the easy part of this nightmare.”
What a fucking tool bag.
