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It took 44 years for Dylan McDermott to relive the most painful moment of his life — and months for Connecticut cops to give the Golden Globe-winning actor closure.
McDermott was 5 when he was kicked out of his Waterbury home by his mother’s heroin-addicted gangster boyfriend.
Standing on the doorstep, he heard shouting, then a gunshot.
A short time later, he watched as his 20-year-old mother, Diane McDermott, was carried out on a stretcher with a fatal .32-caliber gun wound to the head.
Incredibly, investigators labeled it an accidental shooting.
Diane’s boyfriend, John Sponza, told them she was making dinner and he was cleaning his handgun when he set it on the kitchen table.
“She picked up the gun, walked into the pantry, pointed the gun at her head and said, ‘I’m going to shoot myself,’ ” the medical examiner’s report said. “This she did.”
But Diane was right-handed, and the fatal wound was on the left side of the back of her head.
Sponza, a low-level mobster, apparently had connections in law enforcement — and may have been a police informant.
Cops closed the case.
Dylan McDermott, now 50, grew up a hard-drinking teen who blossomed into a talented actor. He got his break playing a Secret Service agent in the 1993 Clint Eastwood film “In the Line of Fire.”
The role led to seven seasons as the star of the hit TV show “The Practice.”
But the mystery of his mother’s death on Feb. 9, 1967, gnawed at him. “When you lose a parent young, it hardens you for life,” he said in 2000.
“I have good memories of my mother,” he said. “When you lose a mother so early, it’s all you have.”
He met Waterbury Mayor Neil O’Leary and Police Superintendent Michael Gugliotti last year while in town for a fund-raiser and raised questions about the cold case.
Gugliotti told the Republican-American newspaper that when his men looked into it, they discovered the relevant files were lost or missing.
As cops reinterviewed sources, Gugliotti was stunned by the abuse Diane and Dylan McDermott suffered at the hands of Sponza.
“Everyone we spoke to, including Dylan, who was only 5 at the time, remembered very violent, vicious arguments,” Gugliotti said.
He said Dylan “vividly recalls” several times when Sponza pointed his gun at the boy and said, “Shut up and get out of here.”
And there was physical evidence. Connecticut’s medical examiner, H. Wayne Carver, reviewed the autopsy and determined the gun found near Diane’s body had too small a caliber to be the killer weapon.
Police reclassified her death as a murder and said Sponza should have been charged with it — as well as two other unsolved homicides.
Sponza will never answer for those crimes. His bullet-riddled body was found in the trunk of a car in a grocery-store parking lot in Waltham, Mass., in 1972.
Dylan’s sister, Robin Herrera, was only 7 months old when their mother died and so was spared her brother’s haunting memories.
But, she said, “I’m happy to know my mother wasn’t mentally ill or depressed. Somebody took her from us; she didn’t leave us.”
Dylan hasn’t commented on the finding, but he explained to the police chief why he had refused for so long to seek answers.
“He said, ‘In order for me to survive and to get where I am today, I needed to bury that moment in my life deep within myself,’ ” Gugliotti said.
“He said it wasn’t until recently that I’ve come to the point in my life where I’m able to begin the process of all this.”