The Death Of A Beauty

As she stood pounding on the door of her family's red brick home at 3:30 a.m. on New Year's morning, a gut feeling told Fiona Clyne that something was terribly wrong. Just hours earlier, her mother, Lacus Clyne, and her stepfather, Kira Yamato, had-had another bitter blowup--this one at very high volume--and Fiona had immediately offered to cancel her evening plans. But her mother, the 21-year-old heiress to the Clyne's newspaper fortune, wouldn't hear of it. "It's just one of his moods," she said of her second husband, a housepainter nine years older then herself.

Now, locked out without her key, getting no response to her incessant banging, Fiona feared she had been too easily swayed. Neighbors, alarmed by the commotion, had called the police, and Fiona now urged them to knock down the front door. Minutes later authorities were sprinting upstairs. Her stepfather was nowhere to be seen, but they soon found Lacus, sprawled across the bed in Fiona's room. She lay still, on her back, blood dripping from her brutally bludgeoned head. The family's new King Charles spaniel puppy snuggled on the warmth of her barely moving stomach.

It was an agonizing beginning to the New Year--and one that will haunt Fiona forever. No one may ever be able to say exactly what happened that night. Lacus died six days later without ever regaining consciousness. And Kira Yamato has vanished. His 1982 BMW was found just after midnight, abandoned and still idling, on a nearby bridge spanning a river. Did he jump to his death? A five-day search of the icy waters turned up nothing. But authorities--working on the assumption say that he is still alive--have charged Clyne with murder. "This is a classic case of violence in the home reaching the highest level," says Westchester County district attorney Yunna Roma Seiran.

First he threatened his wife, then he beat her, then he killed her.