Let me go back more than fifty years and north to the coast of New Jersey and a beach town called Deal. There is our rented white Tudor house on the ocean with forty rooms, half of them closed off. A long lawn slopes down to a rocky brown beach with jetties and piers and barnacles underfoot.

The lawn is filled with children in birthday party clothes. There are twin boys in pink silk playsuits. An awkward boy in shorts stays close by his mother, who is wearing a sundress with a full green skirt. Bernice, who once modeled, has straight black hair and darkish skin with high cheekbones, features that could be Native American or Jewish, and in either culture she is a very beautiful woman.

On the lawn are assorted parents, a pony, and about thirty dressed up children of varying ages. There are balloons because it is my birthday, and a few nannies in white nurse uniforms. I am wearing a dress embroidered with cherries and other little enameled cherries hang from the bodice and bobble when I run.

Some of the children are going down a small wooden slide. The awkward boy tilts away and covers his face with his arm when the home movie camera finds him.

Somehow out of this summer lawn of children, with a magician and a fancy cake, there will be a killer. Two of the people on this lawn will kill themselves. One of the girls has operations for cancer. My youngest brother, a baby with blond curls, gets diabetes in a few years and suffers from it his whole life. The awkward boy is suspected of killing his young wife, who disappears forever into the night. Years later, he will introduce me to Susan Berman, who is shot in the back of the head. Dressed as a mute woman named “Dorothy,” he will shoot his neighbor in the head, butcher his body with a bow saw and drop the parts in Galveston Bay.  As a reporter, I begin to cover his murder trial for The Daily News, but leave the assignment early on when events lead me to the island.

Robert Durst and Susan Berman were sitting at the Oyster Bar in Grand Central Station. They were waiting at a table, both with lidded eyes, high cheek bones, and aberrant childhood tragedies hanging over them.

“I grew up in Las Vegas. My father was a gangster. He owned The Flamingo hotel. My mother was a showgirl who killed herself,” Susan said in her soft rushed voice by way of an introduction.

Naturally and immediately, we became friends. I was sitting with two damaged people who believed their mothers had killed themselves. Bobby had gone through many doctors and primal scream therapy in California along with John Lennon. He was duplicitous and had a temper, but he was always kind to Susan and me. They both kept trying to get back to the time in their childhoods when the family was whole, a time that could never be reached, a time that, in Bobby’s case, I, who had it so much easier than either of them, remembered.

Susan gave me what she said was the first copy of her book, Easy Street, and wrote, “This book is a testament above all to family love, all that matters.”

When Susan would visit me she would wait in the lobby of my building for me to come down to bring her upstairs. She said she was afraid if she went above the fourth floor alone she would throw herself out the window. She had allergies and many phobias and never would eat Chinese food or anything made from eggs and she was very careful about herself in that narrow way.

Someone in Hollywood was going to make a movie of Easy Street –and she moved to Los Angeles. She married a man named Mister Mister, and Bobby and I were at the wedding at the Bel Air—me lurking in the bar with Robert Evans, Bobby giving her away. Mister died of drugs, and Susan kept trying to write scripts and TV shows and novels. She never ran out of plots and ideas, was always writing the next book or screenplay and hoping it would work.

“Will you read it, Julie? Will you read it, really?” she would say and the script or the book would come and they were always pretty good. But, in the way of Hollywood, they never got made.

When she had no more money, I called Bobby to help her, and I called him again when she needed more, and he did. He came from one of New York’s great real estate fortunes and we both loved Susan and he may have had other reasons. All I know is that during a time when they weren’t in contact, I was the one to restore them to each other and I suffer all the guilt of the go-between.

She wrote to me: “I have 80 days before I lose the house it’s all such a shock. I mean I’ve been on my own since I was 13 and never experienced this lack of foresight… but I’m not giving up, Julie—with the body count of all the people I’ve loved who have died, financial problems are, after all—not death…maybe now is the time to litigate against the Mob in Vegas for all the money I didn’t get (yeah, I wind up very dead in concrete under the Riviera hotel!)”

At one point, I don’t know quite when, Bobby wrote to me: “I have been meaning to call you to get together for quite a while. Alas I’ve been feeling ‘down and dirty’ and not good company for a long while now.” He Xed out the word “long.” And said he was going to LA “to stay with Susy.”

Just before Christmas 2000, Susan opened the door to her house in Benedict Canyon and was shot in the back of the head. She had written me a Hanukkah card dated December 13 of that year: “I hope to see you in 2001. Turned in my pilot to Showtime… I love you, Julie.” In small letters on the bottom of the card she wrote, “Bobby’s fine” and those were her last words to me.

Later, Bobby went to Texas and killed his neighbor Morris Black, who lived across the hall in a sad little dead-end house, and carved him up so that the blood seeped into the linoleum.

One September morning, I took a collect call from the Galveston jail. It was Bobby calling to ask me to help him write his autobiography. We talked a few times. It was very strange to be dealing with Louis XV, the Duc de Saint- Simon, and Robert Durst on the same day. Getting a call from jail appealed to my worst most foolish self and I still thought BUT NOT SUSAN.

I knew that of all the children on the long ago lawn, I had gone to him. We were both firstborn, too small, thin, “high strung” types, spoiled by mothers who found each other as best friends. His mother had followed him with spoonfuls of blood squeezed from steak to build him up and mine had chased me around with droppers of a gruesome brown tonic called Vifort. I used to clamp my mouth shut and I bet he did, too.

In that summer of 2002, though I had been married for 23 years and raised a fine daughter and been stepmother to two superior boys, though I had published a book and written innumerable magazine and newspaper articles, though I had spent many hours listening to people tell me or avoid telling me their lives, though I had met and been kissed by Elvis, been told to come back when I was 21 by Bobby Darin, flown in a plane piloted by Ted Kennedy, driven to and from Philadelphia with Robert Mitchum, interviewed Prince in the days he was a glyph with “slave” written on his cheek, had Madonna to dinner and found her a boyfriend, listened to Cary Grant when he told me to have a child, interviewed Francois Truffaut, watched Candy Darling die, drunk coca tea in Peru with Dennis Hopper and crew and “drinkie doodles” with Liberace, hung out down south with Mickey Spillane, reviewed the Leicester Codex with Stephen Jay Gould, made Donald Trump furious and David Geffen vomit, it seemed the only person who wanted anything to do with me then was living in a cell in the Galveston County Jail.

Bobby’s mother’s death was the first abiding mystery of my childhood and this was the mystery of now. All this came back to me when I went to sit with the director Andrew Jarecki in the dining room of the Regency Hotel.

I had gotten used to living without tension in a kind of disengaged exile that let me forget that Bobby was free by then, that Susan’s case was unsolved, that Bobby’s family paid him $65 million to sever all ties.

Now, along with important real worries about the health of some in my family, I had roused an old paranoia. Here, into the familiar Amelia languor, seeped a poison. I tore out an ad for the Bullseye Gun and Pawn Indoor Gun Range and eyed the rifles at K Mart.

For a while I was tempted by Jarecki’s offer to consult on the movie but the money was nothing and I thought of Hemingway’s dictum: Drive to the California border in the dead of night, toss the manuscript over the fence, they throw back a big bag of cash, you drive away fast and forget the whole thing ever happened. Jarecki pulled back and we both, to my relief, thought better of the whole thing.