Some background info;
The Sunday Times
4 September 2005
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Farewell to my gun-toting daughter
The mother of an English schoolgirl turned bounty hunter tells Peter Evans of her tragic life
On June 27, Paulene Stone Burns returned from a trip to Spain. Among the messages waiting for her at her London home was one from her daughter, Domino Harvey, in Los Angeles.
“It was so upbeat, so sweet, she sounded so optimistic,” Paulene recalls. “She said, ‘Mumsy, you’ve no idea how good I’m feeling. Finally, my life is really turning around. I’ve got it sorted. I really, really have. You need never worry about me again.’ I was completely thrilled. I was exhausted, and I decided to call her back the next morning. Domino’s call was the best nightcap. The best. I had my first proper night’s sleep since the whole nightmare began.”
On May 5, Domino had been arrested, charged with conspiracy to possess and distribute more than 500g of methamphetamine. If convicted, she faced 10 years in prison. Though a drug addict, Domino was vehement she had been “set up” and would be cleared at her trial in October.
Such an arrest would not normally arouse the media feeding frenzy that ensued. But Domino, 35, was no ordinary woman. She was an upper-class English schoolgirl turned gun-toting bounty hunter; a $60m Hollywood film based on her was due out in the autumn.
Her mother, a former Vogue covergirl, had been a face of the Swinging Sixties. Her father, Oscar nominee Laurence Harvey, had died of cancer in 1973 when she was four. Harvey had lived his life to the full. “I never see a boundary I don’t want to overstep,” he once told me, and Domino inherited his zest for the extreme.
As a small child, she once hid for four hours in the branches of a garden tree watching her mother’s frantic efforts to find her as the evening turned to dusk. Years later, I asked Domino what she had thought about while sitting alone in her secret place. “I consorted with my demons,” she said. Her demons never left her.
She was invited to leave more than a few English public schools before arriving at Dartington Hall in Devon, which she found to her liking: “It was really relaxed. I spent my time making canoes and studying martial arts,” she later recalled.
When Paulene and her second husband, restaurateur Peter Morton, moved to LA in the 1980s, Domino pleaded — successfully — not to go. At 17, she moved to London and, as she put it, “did a bit of this, a bit of that”, including modelling, which she hated, then in 1989, after a spell in Israel, she followed Paulene to California.
She worked as a ranch hand, developing a fascination for guns, then joined San Diego’s fire department. With a hunting knife on her belt, and a penchant for Irish liqueur, she was nicknamed Dagger Bailey. It still wasn’t enough. In 1993, she joined the King bail bonds agency in LA’s notorious south-central gangland area where violence was always around the corner. She was also free-falling into heroin addiction.
“There was always a part of her that nobody would ever reach,” mused her mother. “She liked the darker side of life. Larry loved that — her ‘invincible fearlessness’ he called it. He was so proud of her.”
Paulene, a gravely beautiful, intelligent woman, handed me an envelope. Inside were two photographs, one of Harvey, the other of his daughter. “Their likeness is extraordinary, don’t you think?” she asked, her eyes moistening.
Later, composed once again, Burns resumed her story. “She was out on $1.3m bail, she had an electronic tag on her ankle, but she was back in her own home, and she sounded so happy. I knew she had hired four people she’d met at Alcoholics Anonymous meetings to stay at the house, to ensure that she didn’t slip back into her old habits.”
At 8.20 the next morning, June 28, the phone rang. It was Paulene’s ex-husband, Peter Morton, calling from California, where it was after midnight.
“I couldn’t get my head around it. I said, ‘What do you mean Domino has died?’ Subconsciously I must have understood because apparently I was crying uncontrollably.” Paulene flew to LA that afternoon. Domino had been found dead in the bath.
Just two weeks before, mother and daughter had spent 10 special days together — “the closest time we’d had together since she was a small child” — after Domino was released on bail.
“She was astonished when she saw me waiting for her in the driveway. She said, ‘Oh, Mumsy, you didn’t have to come all this way to see me’. I said, ‘Oh yes, I did’.
“Domino was 21 when I found out how hooked she was. That was the first time we got her into rehab. But she was always back on drugs the moment she got out.
“The thought that gives me comfort is that she was truly happy in those last 10 days we were together. She hadn’t been really a happy girl for a long time.
“I think the main thing was her acceptance that she’d had her last drug, and would never go down that road again. After those 10 days I would have staked my life on it. She had ‘surrendered’ as they say in Alcoholics Anonymous. So she went out on another kind of high — a high of hope.”
Despite the rumours and press speculation that Domino had committed suicide, or had overdosed on a drug that she was known to be addicted to, Paulene was always convinced that her death was “a terrible accident”.
“Why would she want to kill herself? She had everything to look forward to. The opening of the film, the interviews that had been lined up for her, the chat shows — it was all adding up to her 15 minutes of fame.”
Her belief has been vindicated, she says, by the official autopsy report, revealing that Domino's death was accidental, related to the use of the powerful pain reliever fentanyl. “Apparently it was not one of the painkillers and anti-depressants she was on at the time of her death,” said her mother. “But in February she fell when taking her dog for a walk. She severely cracked her knee, and also gashed her jaw. She was in terrible pain. She was prescribed a very strong painkiller that she wore as a patch. That could have been fentanyl.”
Eight days before Domino died, on Father’s Day, she visited Harvey’s grave in Santa Barbara. The cemetery is on a bluff overlooking the Pacific. “You know,” Domino told the friend with her, “this is where I want to be buried — with my dad.” The premature death of her father had troubled her more than she ever admitted. For a long time she appeared to take little interest in his career, or be impressed by his fame.
“I know it’s irrational, but I used to think that his death was an act of rejection,” she told me once. “I sort of blamed him for dying on me so young. Mummy has been wonderful but I missed him terribly, even though I had no real memory of him to miss.” But as she grew older, she watched his movies with enormous pride. Now her ashes are buried with his.
