Once Steven made the leap, once he began to believe his brother actually bludgeoned their parents to death, he desperately wanted him punished. But as time went on, he believed it was less and less likely that the police would ever make a case against Harvey. And so he decided to take matters into his own hands, to essentially declare war on his brother.

He would use the considerable personal wealth he had earned as co-founder, CEO, and president of Eastco, and as sole benefactor of his parents' estate, to jump-start what he believed was now a moribund investigation. To this end, he hired the private investigating team of Bill Stanton and Jack Maple. Stanton is an indefatigable, gregarious former New York City cop known for his pluck, and Maple is the wily, internationally known onetime wizard of One Police Plaza. Steven's hope was that Stanton and Maple would find the missing piece of the puzzle that would irrefutably tie his brother to the murders. Steven has also hired a profiler, a former NYPD detective named Ray Pierce, and retained Norman Rein, a now-retired Suffolk detective who worked the case early in the investigation.

But the major offensive in his war against his brother is a $17 million wrongful-death suit Steven has filed against Harvey in civil court. It is extremely rare to bring a wrongful-death action in a murder case when there have been no prior criminal proceedings. In fact, this may be the first time it's ever been done in New York.

The more common approach is the one taken by Ron Goldman's family in the O.J. Simpson case: filing a civil action after the criminal trial is completed. Steven's hope, however, is that the lawsuit will shake something lose, turn up some new piece of evidence, or push his brother into making a mistake.

"This legal strategy raises some interesting and maybe even troubling questions," says Howard Fensterman, Steven's lawyer and close friend. "Can the civil process be used as an investigatory tool to aid and abet a law-enforcement agency in its investigation? Indeed, should it? Will families become impatient with the criminal-justice system and pull the trigger too quickly? Can these kinds of cases compromise the criminal investigations?"

Fensterman doesn't claim to have all the answers, but he thinks it's unlikely this kind of legal maneuver will be widely copied: "We have done our due diligence. We have hired a high-end investigation firm and several other experts. It takes significant resources to mount this kind of action. The suit itself, however, is not about money. Harvey doesn't have any, and Steven doesn't need any."

Soon after Steven went public with his civil suit, Harvey responded by starting a Website, a place where he could freely have his say: www.doublemurder.com. The site's stated purpose is to help find the real murderer (maybe O.J. Simpson should try this), raise money for Harvey's defense, and rebut Steven's charges. But it is, regardless of one's view of Harvey's guilt or innocence, an extraordinarily bizarre and creepy exercise.

The site has a brief primer on the murders, pictures of his parents and Harvey and Steven in happier times, and pages that are, well, weirdly inappropriate, like the "Double Murder Scrapbook." Fensterman is labeled both a "scumbag" and a "liar for hire." There's even a page of Harvey's favorite links, which includes a cartoon of a man masturbating.

Steven's team accuses Harvey of using the Website as a weapon of intimidation. Along with the general abuse heaped on Steven and Fensterman and Stanton, Harvey has posted their addresses and phone numbers; details about their families; pictures of Steven's kids; and descriptions of specific things each man has done recently -- all of which seems designed to let them know he's watching and that he can get to them whenever he wants.

As a result, Steven has taken extraordinary measures to ensure the security of his family. Both he and Debbie have expensive, highly trained attack dogs: His is a $15,000 Doberman, hers a German shepherd. There's a bodyguard, and Steven also has a gun, for which he has one of only three full-carry permits in Suffolk County.

In a nearly 40-minute phone conversation with me, Harvey dismissed the lawsuit and the accusations of murder as a hateful attempt by his brother to destroy him: "They have no case, and their reasons and their arguments are ridiculous."

Steven wants to ruin him, Harvey says, over (what else?) money. As principals in Eastco, Steven and his father had what's called key-man insurance -- life insurance taken by the partners in a company. If one partner dies, the other is the beneficiary. When this $1 million policy was taken out, about two months before the murders, Heyward Brown told the insurance company he no longer smoked.

However, when his body was found, there was a pack of cigarettes in his shirt pocket. Harvey then gave the insurance company a statement that his father was indeed a smoker. "Steven gave me an ultimatum. He threatened me that he was going to do this," Harvey claims, referring to the murder accusations and the civil suit, "if I testified that my father was a smoker. I have tape-recorded phone calls. He lost a million dollars on that policy."

But isn't Steven already a millionaire, I asked Harvey? "My brother would slit your throat for a million dollars; that's the kind of person he is. In fact, he'd do this for $10,000. I've been witness to my brother fighting with employees over a dime-an-hour raise."

Though Harvey wouldn't discuss events of the day of the murders, he told me that he loved his father and his mother and that they loved him. He said he intended to call friends of theirs who would testify to this. He also claimed he wasn't cut out of the family's business. Instead, it was his decision. "I walked away from that business; I wasn't thrown out. I don't like the cleaning business -- that's why I'm not in it today."