The case of Lyle and Erik Menendez murdering their parents inside the family’s Beverly Hills home in 1989 was an act of human atrocity. But the capital crime had enough alluring elements—matricide, patricide, wealth, proximity to the movie business—that it captivated the nation—particularly Vanity Fair’s Dominick Dunne. The writer spent five years following the murder investigating the case, reporting from the courtroom, and interviewing surprise witnesses as part of his exhaustive coverage published exclusively in this magazine.

Surreally, while entrenched in the trial nearly 25 years before Law & Order’s Dick Wolf would adapt the story into an anthology series starring Edie Falco as defense attorney Leslie Abramson, Dunne prophetically noted the saga’s dramatic potential.

“In Judge Stanley M. Weisberg’s courtroom in the Van Nuys Superior Court of the State of California for the County of Los Angeles, it is as if we are participating in a long mini-series, in which Leslie Abramson, the defense attorney for Erik, the younger of the two confessed killers, is defining for all future actresses how the role of the tough lady defense attorney should be played,” Dunne wrote in a fascinating 1993 report. “Her scene-stealing performance, which at times infuriates Judge Weisberg, as it infuriates the prosecution, has all eyes focused on her every moment. And that’s exactly where she wants all eyes to be. There is never an instant when she is not performing. And she knows how to play to the Court TV camera as well as Barbra Streisand knows how to play to a movie camera.”

Wolf’s Law & Order-ization of the case premieres on Tuesday evening. But the first episode proves how difficult it can be to distill sordid, real-life details into tidy segments between commercial breaks. Ahead, a primer on Dunne’s engrossing coverage of this case.

Dunne’s investigative feature detailed the night of the murders, the gruesome crime scene, and the clues that contradicted the initial theory that the murder was a mob hit. Specifically, Dunne went deep on the Menendez family dynamics, describing Lyle—who was 21 at the time of the murders, and made the hysterical 9-1-1 call declaring his parents dead—as a failed Princeton student embattled in a hopeless power struggle with his domineering father. Erik, who was 18 at the time of the murders, had been with his brother during the evening in question—initially telling police that they went out to see Batman the night his parents were killed with a 12-gauge shotgun. Their mother, Kitty, was well liked in the community, while their father, self-made Hollywood executive José, would prove to be a pivotal figure in the ensuing trials—portrayed as the victim by prosecutors even as the defense team described him as an abusive villain who drove his sons to atrocious acts in the name of self-protection.

Intriguingly, Dunne also tracked down the witness who led to the arrests of the brothers: Judalon Smyth, a woman who happened to be sleeping with the married therapist who had worked on-and-off with the brothers. He relayed his conversation with Smyth in the piece.

Three years later, Dunne aired the Menendez family’s dirty secrets—everything from Lyle’s toupee to the family fishing trip that preceded the murders. He also reviewed Abramson’s fierce (and occasionally frightening) performance in court.

The following year, after spending hundreds of hours inside the courtroom during the trial, Dunne published a fiery piece about the trial’s conclusion: two hung juries.

“So what happened? I’ll tell you what happened,” Dunne wrote. “I was there, and these are my beliefs. Two juries took the word of two world-class liars, two rich, spoiled, arrogant losers who were already on the road to a criminal life when they shot their mother’s face off and their father’s brains out.”

Dunne also recapped Leslie Abramson’s “persuasive powers” as a defense attorney as well as Lyle Menendez’s allegations of being sexually molested by his father—a witness-stand admission so emotional that it even had Dunne questioning whether he had been wrong about the brothers. Having spoken to a Menendez relative, a Beverly Hills Police Department detective, and countless other insiders with knowledge of the family, Dunne debunked the molestation allegation while wrestling with the fact that he was “both repulsed and fascinated by the Menendez brothers.”

In which the author grappled with the aftermath of the trial—including Leslie Abramson’s strange behavior entertaining jurors “at an elaborate seven-hour dinner party in her new home in the fashionable Hancock Park area of Los Angeles” and allowing them to speak to Erik Menendez himself, “who telephoned from the Los Angeles County Jail.”

Shortly after the Menendez brothers were sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole, Dunne penned his closing arguments on the trial—and his thoughts on O.J. Simpson’s acquittal—in a powerful conclusion to his Vanity Fair crime series.

“What I have suspected since I became involved with the Los Angeles murder trials and O.J. Simpson is that winning is everything, no matter what you have to do to win,” Dunne wrote. “If lies have to be told, if defenses have to be created, if juries have to be tampered with in order to weed out those who appear to be unsympathetic to the defendant, then so be it. The name of the game is to beat the system and let the guilty walk free. If you can get away with it.”

Though Dunne died in 2009, the media interest in the Menendez brothers—who have been in jail for 27 years now—continues. Lyle Menendez is currently located in Mule Creek State Prison in Ione, California, where Menendez said he feels “more at peace” than he would out from behind bars.

Earlier this year, Menendez told ABC News, “I found that my own childhood prepared me surprisingly well for the chaos of prison life. I am the kid that did kill his parents, and no river of tears has changed that and no amount of regret has changed it. I accept that. You are often defined by a few moments of your life, but that’s not who you are in your life, you know. Your life is your totality of it . . . You can’t change it. You just, you’re stuck with the decisions you made.”

Erik, meanwhile, is incarcerated at the Richard J. Donovan Correctional Facility in San Diego. Earlier this year, he told People that he regrets the murder.

“I would give my life to change it,” Erik told People. “I talk to my mom. She knows my heart. I ask for forgiveness.”

Despite their traumatic history, the Menendez brothers stay in touch.

“We write each other regularly,” Lyle said earlier this month. “We even play chess through the mail, but it’s a little slow.”