He Murdered My Uncle...Then Wrote a Fake Memoir About It

_Illustrations by_**Claire Wyman** | _Story_ _edited by_**Brendan Spiegel** Police arrived at the Sundowner Hotel and Casino in Reno, Nevada, at a quarter to 9 a.m. on Monday, November 10, 1997. The body of 45-year-old Mark Slavin lay in the rear bedroom of room 2017**,**a laundry bag tied over his head, a belt around his neck and a red Swiss Army knife near his non-dominant hand. Mark had been brutally beaten and his face was stained with dried blood.

His “badly disfigured” nose had pieces of bone protruding from its bridge. Both of his eyes were blackened and swollen shut, and lacerations and abrasions were found along his shoulder, neck, jaw and face. The shapes of his belt — a turtle and a steer’s head — were imprinted on Mark’s neck.

Detectives believed that the crime scene had been staged. Police reports detail bloody drag marks on the hotel carpet and suspicions that the knife did not appear to be in Mark’s possession during the altercation, but was placed after his death. Mark, long known as “Buzzy” to his friends and Uncle Mark to me, was a lifelong partier enamored with coke, quaaludes and other delicacies.

Yet his death came as a great shock — Buzzy was never violent and hadn’t been in the company of any particularly shady associates for years. Mark Slavin wasn’t actually my uncle, but one of my father’s closest friends and a regular presence in our lives. A few weeks before his death, Mark met my father, brother and me at the now-defunct diner chain Coco’s in Danville, California — just a couple miles north of where my family lived.

I was 9 years old and don’t remember much about the dinner itself — it wasn’t abnormal for Mark to meet us, especially if my mom wasn’t around — but I do recall an unusual vibe as I ate what was probably a plate of chicken fingers and a half-diet, half-regular Coke. There was something both rushed and final about that encounter at Coco’s. My child brain barely registered it, but years later I can feel the off-kilter EQ in my bones.

He seemed very animated, and he was happy,” my dad, David Lipsky, recalls of that night at Coco’s. Jimmy later described Mark Slavin as “practically [his] best friend,” but had left Buzzy in anything but a friendly state. Per _The New York Times Magazine:_“Lerner, who like Slavin had taken an assortment of cocaine and prescription drugs, had in effect tortured his friend.…Lerner’s main injuries, by contrast, were badly swollen hands.