She arrived because a stranger couldn’t get through the gate, expecting inconvenience, not catastrophe. The house where she’d grown up, where premieres were toasted and birthdays celebrated, had become a crime scene. The image of her father’s body is something she will carry alone in that first moment, before sirens, before statements, before the world knew. Only later, through a paramedic’s words, did the second blow land: her mother, Michele, was gone too.
As headlines exploded and prosecutors weighed the death penalty for her brother Nick, the case stopped being just another Hollywood tragedy and became a brutal portrait of family violence. Behind the legal language — “special allegation,” “life without parole” — is a daughter who walked in as a child and walked out as the only one left to remember the home that once was.
