There, he said, he overcame his personal demons and wrote his first book, The Two Mrs. Grenvilles. In November 1982, his daughter, Dominique Dunne, best known for her part in the film Poltergeist, was murdered by strangulation. Dominick Dunne attended the trial of John Thomas Sweeney, Dominique's ex-boyfriend. Sweeney was convicted of voluntary manslaughter and sentenced to six and a half years in prison, but he only served two and a half years of his sentence. Dunne's article "Justice: A Father's Account of the Trial of his Daughter's Killer" ran in the March 1984 issue of Vanity Fair. 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, 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. This lawsuit was eventually dismissed. Throughout his life, Dunne frequently socialized with, wrote about, and was photographed with celebrities. Sean Elder's review of Dunne's memoir, The Way We Lived Then, recounted how Dunne appeared at a wedding reception for Dennis Hopper, writing, "But in the midst of it all, there was one man who was getting what ceramic artist Ron Nagle would call 'the full cheese,' one guy everyone gravitated toward and paid obeisance to." That man was