THE PRICE OF INFAMY

Her father's mistress— a teenage girl—shot her mother in the head on the front steps of their family home when Jessica Buttafuoco was only nine years old. Now, a figure in one of the most infamous tabloid sagas of the 1990s—hashed and rehashed everywhere from the New York Post to The New York Times, played out in various TV movies starring Drew Barrymore or Alyssa Milano as the Long Island Lolita—is confronting the crime that shaped her whole life

- BY MICHELLE RUIZ

On January 16, 1993, a white limo idled outside Jessica Buttafuoco’s bayfront house in Massapequa, New York, waiting to whisk her to Saturday Night Live featuring her musical heroine, Madonna. Jessie was 9 going on 16, a budding jazz dancer who'd recently performed her version of the “Vogue” video before a tingling audience of girlfriends at Adventure-land, the local amusement park. She had a doll face, a raspy voice, and the spunk of Marisa Tomei in My Cousin Vinny. And she was one of my best friends.

Jessie had willed the night into existence. “My dad’s on that show all the time,” she reasoned. “He could probably hook up tickets.”

Eight months earlier, while Jessie sat in Ms. La Marca’s third-grade class on a Tuesday afternoon in May, her mother, Mary Jo Buttafuoco, 37, a down-to-earth Irish Catholic homemaker, answered the doorbell to find 17-year-old Amy Fisher wielding a .25-caliber pistol, spouting a story about a sexual relationship with Jessie’s dad, Joey Buttafuoco, a body shop owner with a bravado as big as his salt-and-pepper hair. Neighbors—mercifully, firefighters—heard the gunshot. In the blur of days that followed, Mary Jo awoke from lifesaving surgery to the bullet still lodged just above her spinal column and her husband’s staunch denials. The teen assailant was just an obsessed client, he insisted. Jessie’s mom stood by her dad, sparking the sanctimony of a generation of fellow housewives. The Buttafuocos have lived the long tail of a National Enquirer story ever since. With its themes of sex and violence, the crime fed the burgeoning tabloid beast of the ’90s, sandwiched between the Menendez brothers and the Bobbitts. But a trashtastic new multimedia machine—Hard Copy and Cops, Jerry Springer and nascent cable news—blasted scandal to the masses round the clock, alongside