The dogs wouldn’t stop barking that night. Susan Berman’s house in an upscale Los Angeles neighborhood was dark, but her three dogs were going mad. When the baying continued into the morning hours, neighbors started to get suspicious. Someone called the police. Friends knew Berman, a journalist, had fallen on hard times: She was reportedly facing eviction, was taking personal loans worth thousands of dollars and had sold some of her furniture. But how bad could it be?

Police found a gruesome scene on Dec. 24, 2000. Berman was dead on the hardwood floor, clad in sweats, the victim of a single gun blast from a 9mm pistol. “Nothing was disturbed or taken from the residence,” Brad Roberts of the Los Angeles Police Department told the New York Times at the time. “It looked like the target of the murder was her.”

Robert Durst on HBO’s ‘The Jinx’: I ‘killed them all.’

The New York real-estate heir known for his alleged connections to three deaths was arrested on the eve of the show’s finale.

Friends were convinced this was an inside job. Berman was notoriously fastidious and quirky. As Lisa DePaulo noted in New York magazine, Berman didn’t cross bridges on certain streets. She didn’t eat at a restaurant unless she was absolutely sure its ingredients wouldn’t trigger one of her many professed allergies. She was terrified of falling out of windows. “Susan, with all her fears and neuroses, would never have let a stranger in,” DePaulo wrote, calling her a “Mafia princess.”

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But who killed her? Some thought it was her landlady — who was reputed to carry a gun and hated Berman’s lackadaisical attitude toward rent and with whom she had vicious arguments. Others contended it was some ghost from her father’s mafia days. Others cast suspicion on her agent who, according to a friend quoted in “Homicide Special,” a book about LAPD detectives, “was not sorry at all. … He seemed angry. … At the memorial service his face was like a mask. No emotion.”

And then, of course, there was her wildly wealthy, infamous college friend, Robert Durst. “Bobby,” she called him. In her books, his name appeared among the acknowledgements. “It was always, ‘Bobby this, Bobby that, wonderful Bobby,” one friend told New York magazine. So wonderful, in fact, that Durst had written her checks for substantial amounts, reportedly affected a paternal air around her, and perhaps even divulged the secrets of his murky past.

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Had he told her what happened to his wife, Kathleen Durst, who went missing in 1982 under unusual circumstances? Berman had, after all, acted as a spokeswoman for Durst after the disappearance. Did he fear she would rat him out to police when they reopened their investigation into Kathie’s fate 18 years later?

[Robert Durst on HBO’s ‘The Jinx’: I ‘killed them all.’]

On Saturday, Durst was arrested at a New Orleans hotel, where police said he was checked in under the false name of Everett Ward and in possession of a .38 revolver. On Monday, Los Angeles authorities charged Durst in Berman’s killing, a crime for which he may face the death penalty.

“Anyone with common sense … can connect the dots,” friend Rich Markey told the Los Angeles Times on Monday. “Whether legally, he can be held accountable remains to be seen, but … the friends and family of Susan can put the whole thing to rest.”

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Durst, recorded making what many interpreted as some sort of confession to killing three people in the HBO documentary “The Jinx,” has denied any role in both Berman’s killing and the disappearance of his wife. “Bob Durst didn’t kill Susan Berman,” Durst attorney Dick DeGuerin told reporters on Monday. “He’s ready to end all the rumor and speculation and have a trial.”

For friends of Berman, the arrest ushered in a complex amalgam of emotions. Finally, it seems, the story of Susan Berman will get a final chapter. But at the same time, the arrest rekindled memories of a woman who was troubled but loyal, talented but haunted.

In some ways, wrote journalist Cathy Scott, who wrote a book about Berman’s murder and described her as “reclusive,” Berman’s demons are what made her and Durst so close. To some degree, each was the mirror image of the other.

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Both were raised lavishly. Durst was the son of a real estate tycoon worth hundreds of millions. Berman was the daughter of David Berman — “Davie the Jew,” a mafia king who helped make Las Vegas a gambling empire. Both were the offspring of women who would commit suicide. And both had trouble outrunning the circumstances of their birth. Durst tried to escape his family when he was young to open a health food market in Vermont. Berman could never get past her mafia family, writing a critically acclaimed memoir, “Easy Street,” that documented her youth as the daughter of a gangster.

Her dad didn’t carry house keys, she wrote in “Easy Street,” for fear that he would get ambushed and someone would gain access to his home. He paid only in cash. And their “vacations,” as he called them, were really a way to ditch the dangers of some mafia dust-up.

“My father’s story is a very American story, and I am the most American product of all,” she wrote in the Chicago Tribune in 1981. “I have been privileged to go to America’s finest prep schools and colleges and to work in my field to the fullest extent of my talent. I don’t feel that I am part of a disenfranchised subculture but rather a part of the mainstream, and that is what my father would have wanted for me. … To me, this is the story of a father who was a gangster, not a gangster who was a father.”

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She met Durst at the University of California at Los Angeles, and the two remained close for many years. After journalism school at the University of California at Berkeley, she worked for the San Francisco Examiner, New York magazine and KPIX-TV in San Francisco. Then in 1982, while Berman was tending to her career as a journalist, Durst’s wife went missing. The tabloids went to town on the scandal. And Berman became his de facto publicist. According to journalist Miles Corwin, who wrote “Homicide Special,” she was on his side “unequivocally,” even signing a sworn statement that attested to Durst’s story.

It was the closeness between the two during those chaotic days that led some relatives to suspect she knew the truth of what happened. “Knowing Susie like I did, I believe at the time of Kathleen’s disappearance, Susie — as Bobby’s publicist — helped him with his alibi,” cousin Dave Berman told Las Vegas CityLife in 2004.

One friend told New York magazine that Berman conceded “she’d provided Bobby’s alibi,” though she believed he wasn’t involved in his wife’s disappearance.

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And in the days immediately after Berman’s killing, some friends likewise dismissed the idea Durst had anything to do with that death as well. Berman was raised in the mafia, the thinking went. She would never rat out a friend. No matter how hot the heat got. “If she could compartmentalize Davie the Jew,” one friend told New York at the time, “she could compartmentalize Bobby Durst.”

But then again, if police allegations are to believed, perhaps she couldn’t. Or Durst simply feared she couldn’t.

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