Susan Berman - the author of Easy Street, crime novelist and screenwriter with a kindly smile - died like a character from one of her own books or movies: murdered by a single shot to the back of the head. By the time her body was found on Christmas Eve, she had been dead two days.
But the chilling twist to Berman's death is that she was probably killed because she was a character from one of her own books. Berman knew too much about her subject - the Las Vegas mafia - because she was herself a child of the mob.
Now, it seemed, she had mixed fact and fiction too much for her family's liking - or that of its rivals.
She had been killed with a small-calibre handgun and there was no sign of a break-in at her home in luxurious Benedict Canyon, in Beverly Hills. Her body was only found because neighbours spotted her dogs running loose.
Detective Brad Roberts of the LAPD said: 'It looked like the target of the murder was her.' A mob hit? 'We have to look at every angle, of course.'
Susan Berman learned how to count in casinos. Her childhood was lived among the mobsters and gangsters who turned a desert strip town into the phantasmagoria of Las Vegas.
They arranged for Elvis Presley and Liberace to sing at her birthday parties. Berman was buried beside her father, David Berman. He was a Vegas mafia kingpin in an iron triangle which also included the infamous Bugsy Siegel and Meyer Lansky.
Berman and Siegel ran the Flamingo Hotel in Vegas, the trailblazer for the gambling empire, featuring Sinatra singing at an opening night - also on Christmas Eve, in 1946. Berman took it over single-handed after Siegel was shot the following year in Beverly Hills, a short distance from Susan Berman's home.
This was the childhood Susan Berman, a former journalist, plundered in order to write her books and screenplays, and produce television documentaries about the heady and hedonistic days of the Vegas boom in the 1940s and 50s. The most celebrated books were Easy Street, in 1981 - which was about her father - and Lady Las Vegas. Her movies for television included Las Vegas: House of Cards.
Berman had cut his teeth arranging the first of the spate of kidnappings for ransom in New York during the prohibition 1920s. He was described as 'so tough he could kill a man with one hand tied behind his back'.
He, Siegel and Lansky were gangsters from a mainly Jewish syndicate which pioneered the development of a sleepy desert cow town. After turning Vegas into a goldmine, they rapidly found themselves in an uneasy alliance with the famous Bonnanno clan when the Cosa Nostra firms moved in for the pickings.
The triad had little option: Vegas became the prize in a prolonged and ferocious war between New York's mafia families and those from Chicago, led by the equally fierce Accardo clan. It was a war between the inheritors of the legacy of Al Capone and Lucky Luciano; Siegel had been connected with Luciano.
Berman died a natural death in 1957 when his daughter was 12; her mother committed suicide a year later.
But Siegel was murdered in Los Angeles because the mafia there was and still is allied to Capone and Chicago - a fact that has no doubt not escaped the investigators into Susan Berman's death.
Of her murder, an unnamed 'entertainment industry executive' told the UPI news agency: 'I heard initially that she was doing a tell-all and naming names and stuff. I think the mob got tired of hearing about her.'
Susan Berman, who was 55, lived an intensely private life - there was a brief marriage in the 1980s about which she never spoke, and she raised the two children of a boyfriend of 13 years ago; they preferred to stay with her after the couple broke up.
One of those children, Sareb Kaufman - with whom she would dine twice a week - said that she had 'complicated fears' and 'lived cautiously'. Among her worries was an acute fear of heights - she would not go above the ground level of a building without being accompanied by someone she trusted.
Kaufman last saw her when he set off for a holiday in Europe a week before Christmas. 'She was happy. She had a couple of new possibilities,' he said, among which was a memoir about high-rolling female gamblers in Vegas. 'You just ask yourself,' he said of her murder, 'why and how?'
Her manager, Nyle Brenner, said that he did not know 'if there was anything she was working on that had any relevance to the current mafia,' but confirmed that she was still mining her past for 'several other projects' when she was killed.
'She had been talking to a lot of people in Vegas recently,' added Brenner, 'People who had a past'. Among the current projects was a proposed television documentary about the Vegas underworld, focusing on women, a pitch to ABC television for a movie based on her diaries and a series being developed by Showtime called Sin City .
Brenner quickly joined a chorus of friends and relatives who deny that the writer's death at the hand of an otherwise apparently motiveless killer had any connection to the mob.
'Whoever committed this act of violence,' said the dead woman's cousin, Deni Marcus, 'maybe they did it this way to make it look suspicious. To keep people guessing at some silly notion.'
