Trollheart's Most Evil

[Trollheart]

Introduction: What is Evil?

It's a question that has been asked for centuries now, and really we're no closer to defining what we consider to be evil than we were in the Dark Ages. The nature of evil - or rather, our perception of it - changes with each few generations. Not all that long ago,  homosexuality was seen as evil (and largely still is by certain groups, but that will probably never change); further back, women getting the vote was viewed with the same distaste, and moving forward a hundred years, equal rights for women was not only frowned on by men but also many women, who believed it would lead to anarchy and chaos. A century ago, even rape was tacitly condoned, as long as the man was rich and powerful and held the fate of the woman in his hands. A gentleman - or that gentleman's son or sons, or even his friends - was quite free to take any servant girl that took his fancy, whether she was willing or not. Refusal would result in dismissal, no reference being given and therefore the unfortunate woman would be cast out into the streets, where she would have no way to make her living other than by selling her body. Which would then make her an, to quote ELO, evil woman, showing the ridiculous and distasteful hypocrisy of the times. While the "romantic attentions" of rich men towards the lower-class women who worked for them were not actually encouraged, they weren't discouraged either, and with the legal profession, the courts and the police all exclusively male, a woman who brought a complaint against an employer stood little chance of any sort of success, and even if she somehow did manage to secure a conviction, she would be blacklisted and would never work again.

Murder, in general, has always been seen as evil, but of course there are exceptions. Killing to save yourself, or to free someone from the attentions of another who seeks to do them harm, while still illegal is again looked upon as being acceptable in certain cases, and will often form the basis of a defence and acquittal on those grounds. Killing in a time of war is generally not seen as murder, though here the waters are a little murkier. Stick to what are rather laughingly and ironically called the rules of conduct and you'll be okay. Nobody is going to call a soldier who kills another soldier or a pilot who drops bombs on a city a murderer (though they are), no more than they would accuse the generals and commanders who send such men on these missions of such crimes. But step outside those bounds - commit rape (maybe, not always), assault children, shoot an unarmed man - and a soldier may very well be opening himself up to a charge of homicide, or even war crimes. In these cases, such men would be looked upon as evil.

Our conception and notion of evil has changed to suit the times we live in. When everyone went around armed with swords and you could be jumped on the way home, or knocked off your horse by thieves, defending yourself - even if you killed your assailant - was praised and not condemned, and as long as you were of a highborn status, anyone who displeased you could be killed without any ramifications, and would not be seen as evil in the slightest. Gentlemen fought duels to "satisfy honour", and were not seen as being evil, even if the duel ended - as they often did - in the death of one or both of the participants. Torture, now seen as vile and evil (and useless) was once the tool of kings and queens, seen as a legitimate mechanism for extracting information. Tie someone to a stake now and burn them alive, you're most definitely evil, but back in the mists of history it was not only legal but applauded. Burn the witch! Burn the heretic! Burn the traitor! And so on.

And of course, one man's evil is not necessarily that of another. It's notoriously based on your point of reference: the evil Islamist terrorist may be seen by some of his own people as a brave freedom fighter, and those on the losing side of any war are almost always characterised as evil, while those who win are the good guys. Many studies have been made and books written on the belief that good and evil are two sides of the one coin; many others claim there is no such thing as either good or evil, and that both are false constructs made by humans to try to make sense of an otherwise baffling and terrifying world. And of course evil is a label that can be attached by those in power to their enemies, or by one group to another in order to demonise them and legitimise their own views and actions.

Evil is, in the final analysis, unquantifiable. What you or I think of as evil may not be what someone else sees it as, and you could spend your life going round and round in circles, arguing the toss and never getting any closer to a true understanding, or even definition of the term. But for the purposes of this journal, we must have a basic definition, which is that evil is that which is unacceptable in society, that which diminishes or tries to diminish society, the practice of which requires the offender(s) to be removed from society, and that which breaks the laws of society by threatening the status quo, law and order, and life itself. I just made that up, and it's a completely inadequate definition, I know: much of what's mentioned above could include the likes of bank robberies or joyriding, which technically don't qualify as evil in and of themselves, but you try coming up with a better one. Evil used to be defined as that which was against God, but what happens if you don't believe in God, if you can't whine "the Devil made me do it!"?

Anyway, for this journal I'm just taking the basics - murder, rape, paedophilia, white slavery, cults - all the sort of things the average person may be expected to think of as evil. War is certainly in there, and you'll find Hitler sticking his ugly fascist nose into this at some point, as will others from various wars, but it would be disingenuous and unfair to tar all war leaders, and all those who participate in war as evil. Was Napoleon evil? How about Wellington? One was on the losing side; does that then make him evil? What about Julius Caesar? Genghis Khan? William Wallace? Clearly, not every figure in war can be described as evil, nor do they deserve to be, but some do, and we'll meet these as we go along.

Murderers? Generally, and with few if any caveats, yes. While I don't intend to feature every murderer in history here - I have other journals looking at that - I will be featuring murderers, but only the worst of the worst, and that doesn't mean they have to have killed the most. Ian Huntley only (!) killed two people, but I might indeed consider him more evil than, say, Levi Bellfield, the so-called Bus Stop Killer, who killed twice as many. So murderers definitely, but if that was all then I could just call this Trollheart's Murders and we'd be done. It's not though, so we'll be looking back through history to find the cruellest and most evil men, women, perhaps even children; group, cults, organisations, anything that can be said to rise above the level of what we perceive or accept as "normal" evil. Oh yes, here, only the very worst will do.

Step this way, and be careful: I think the light is broken...

[Trollheart]

And after all that, our first article concerns a murder. Not too surprising: next to rape, or even ahead of it, murder is seen as the most evil thing a human can do. Taking someone's life is the ultimate theft, the final act from which there is no coming back; you literally can't say sorry and though you can try to make amends if you feel remorse afterwards, it's too late for the person or people you murdered. Corpses can't forgive you. So murder is pretty much always going to be high on the list when you talk of evil. But this isn't a serial killer - actually, it's two murderers, but neither are serial killers - in fact, they only killed two people. Only, yeah. But you know what I mean. However, it's who they killed that made, and makes, this murder all the more shocking. People who, according to some, perhaps in some ways brought retribution of the bloodiest sort upon themselves, but who, according to others, were simply innocents who were killed for one of the oldest motives in human history. People who should have been the last the killers would have thought of killing.

Their parents.

Even that, though is not quite what makes this pair totally evil, in my mind. Murderers come in many shapes and forms, from the cold-blooded ones who either never regret what they have done or even revel in it, to the ones who later realise the enormity of their crime and break down, often turning themselves in or, on perhaps rarer occasions, killing themselves, unable to live with what they have done, or fearing a life in prison or even the death penalty. And then there are the more cunning ones; the ones who try to cover up their crimes, blame others, deflect suspicion, falsify alibis and cry crocodile tears over the people they have killed.

Few though come close to the sort of brazen and arrogant behaviour displayed by these two brothers, who attempted to blacken their parents' name even in death, turn the tide of public sympathy their way, and invented stories of mob hits and other wild accusations and improbable theories, anything to make the police look the other way. And for a long time, it worked.

"The slaughterhouse of failure is not my destiny." - Og Mandino, The Greatest Salesman in the World

Sharper Than a Serpent's Tooth: The Menendez Brothers

I: Big in America

Little did the mother of Erik and Lyle Menendez realise, as she shook her head and sucked in her cheeks and declared "Boy, this is lousy writing" that the manuscript she held in her hands, written by her son Erik, about a man who murders all his family, was both a future confession in all but name and a blueprint and pointer to her own vicious death at the hands of he and his brother Lyle. With characteristic lack of flair, the story was titled "Friends", and the boys had hoped to shop it around to film studios in the belief it would be picked up and they would become famous. They would. Become famous that is, or at least infamous, but for different, and yet almost exactly these reasons.

Mary Louise "Kitty" Menendez met her husband to be when she was working on the campus radio station at South Illinois University, and was instantly smitten. Her friends were amazed: Kitty, as she was universally known, was a bright, beautiful and outgoing girl, always ready to party and dance, but allied this to an almost bookish intelligence other girls her age either did not possess, or were afraid, in the repressive American sixties, to display. Kitty didn't care too much for public opinion or scandal, which was amply demonstrated when she chose Cuban immigrant student Jose Mendendez over all the blue-eyed American boys who drooled after the young and popular beauty. America at the time was less than well disposed towards immigrants of any stripe, but the McCarthy hearings of the previous decade and the revolution led by Fidel Castro in Cuba, presenting Uncle Sam with a fledgling communist country right on its own doorstep, left Cubans at the top of the list of people not to be trusted.

Certainly not to be married, but this is exactly what happened after a short romance - perhaps not to be characterised necessarily as whirlwind, but certainly different from the usual "wait and see, get to know them" idea prevalent in American society. Naturally there was opposition, but less naturally, it came from both sides, as Jose's family believed him too young to be married at nineteen years of age. Kitty's family, of course, saw the match as well beneath her. She was considered one of the midwestern elite, coming from a good family with good connections, while Jose was a foreigner, a freshman and most likely (though this was probably not said to his face) a communist. All the same over there, I hear. But in the young immigrant student Kitty had met a kindred spirit. Jose cared little for his family's protestations, having come to America at age sixteen, and anyway he was a man who, for the rest of his life, would never allow anyone to tell him what to do.

From Kitty's point of view, Jose was different to the long line of carbon-copy clones of the American Dream she had either dated or been admired by. He had depth, he had feeling, he had drive. Most of her college mates already had their lives and careers planned out for them from an early age by influential and powerful parents, and had little to fear in the big bad world. If these were cardboard cut-outs, Jose was the real thing. She saw something in him; a man who had definitely not been handed everything but who was determined to overcome his social and racial handicaps and make something of himself, a man who would not be led by the nose into a safe life but would instead take the future by the throat, shake it and demand it gave him what he wanted, what he deserved, what he dreamed of and planned for. A man who would take no shit from anyone, ever. In this, she would find to her cost she was not exaggerating.

"Dear  Jose, I quit. Fuck you." - Anonymous Hertz Car Rentals salesman

Jose Menendez had fled Cuba at the time of the revolution. His family was a powerful one who had lost everything in the communist takeover, necessitating Jose's flight from the country in the hope of a better life. Although a mere lad of sixteen, who had never been outside his home country in his life, Jose did not lack for confidence; in fact, he was arrogant to a fault, and this arrogance would only grow as he prospered and his business empire grew. His first real triumph was to wrest the gorgeous American girl away from all her gorgeous American would-be suitors, and to have thwarted people more handsome and who surely believed themselves better than he was a victory indeed. In some ways, though it can't be doubted he loved Kitty, she was more a demonstration to the world at large of his power. In courting, and winning her, he was growling at the world though those dark, smoky eyes and saying "Look: I take what I want, and you can't stop me."

And nobody could. James Onedin, the anti-hero of the BBC period drama The Onedin Line once remarked that he had "ambition enough for an army of Napoleons", but Jose's desire for success would outstrip even the aspirations of the fictional sea captain. In a way, it's quite remarkable how a Cuban immigrant with literally nothing rose to the heights Jose Menendez achieved, and yet, the nature of his climb and the attitude he adopted, both while getting there and once sitting at the top of the corporate tree, make it difficult to admire him or even have any sympathy for him.

Put simply, one word could describe Jose Menendez: arrogance. He truly believed, not that he was necessarily better than other people, but that he was as good as them, and intended to prove it. Racial prejudices of course fuelled this desire; as mentioned above, America has never been particularly kind to immigrants and foreigners (despite being a land of them), but special repugnance seems to be reserved for Cubans, who are presumably seen as "commies" and "reds" living on the doorstep of the world's greatest democracy, and dedicated to tearing it down. Then again, no matter your beginnings or your disadvantages, one thing will make you instantly and unanimously, and unquestioningly accepted in American society, and that is money. Jose knew that money was the key to his being taken seriously, and he worked hard to get it.

But he wouldn't be doing so in Illinois. Taking his new wife east to the bright lights of New York City, where his family lived, Jose enrolled at Queens College as an accountancy student, and forced the best he could out of himself. He wasn't the greatest student, and times were hard, their income mainly coming from Kitty's job teaching, something a proud and arrogant man like Jose Menendez would have hated: being supported by his wife. He intended to make his own way in the world, for her to be relying on him, but first he had to graduate and look for a job. For now, he paid his way as best he could by taking a part-time job at the local supermarket, no doubt furious he was just one of many other immigrants there all trying to get by, and treated no differently. He had, however, a talent for figures, and despite not studying for the CPA he passed it a year early, and was taken on as a trainee by the accountancy firm Coopers & Lybrand. Now making a decent wage and able to support his wife, Jose moved them to a decent apartment in middle-class Queens, and in 1968 Kitty had her first child.

Jose began to show what kind of man he was, and what kind of man he intended to be, when he was sent to audit the finances of a client for Coopers & Lybrand. Asked for his opinion after sitting through a long board meeting at Lyons Container, where management pored over unlikely plans to restructure the company, Jose flatly told them their ideas would not work, and they should go with his plan. Although surely shocked and even angered by the temerity of a snot-nosed kid from the firm they paid to do their accounts telling them what they should do, the directors listened and became more convinced as the young hotshot spoke that he knew what he was talking about, and more, that his plan had indeed a better chance of success than theirs.

They clamoured to have him on board as a director, but Jose was a man who was able to manipulate those around him. It was as if he could read their minds and their hearts, see into their souls and find their weaknesses. He pushed the board for a huge salary - three times what he was earning at Coopers & Lybrand, and he got it. So it was back to Chicago for the Menendezes, Kitty taking care of her new son full-time while Jose worked to turn the fortunes of the ailing corporation around. He not only succeeded, but did so in a year, and doubled the company's revenue. He became chief executive, and hired his brother-in-law, Carlos Baralt, as his assistant. Jose's management style, however, was unpopular and after a row with the chairman of the board he was forced out of Lyons, taking Baralt with him. Nobody doubted what a wonder he had wrought at the company, just nobody liked him, and he made it easy not to like him, being arrogant, condescending, sometimes brutal in his dealings with others - subordinates or not - and basically making enemies of everyone around him.

This behaviour would continue throughout his life, both in his professional and his family life, and people learned very quickly not to cross him. Everyone got to know what it meant to be on the wrong side of Jose Menendez, and he was almost certainly more feared than respected. This meant, of course, that he had few friends, few equals with which to share his success and brag about how well he had done. In 1971 he joined Hertz Car Rental and again within a year he had progressed like, as my mother used to say, a dose of salts through the management structure, becoming chief financial manager and then general manager, and true to his reputation, began firing people left, right and centre as he flexed his muscles and threw his weight around. This behaviour went against him, and against Hertz, as the executives and salespeople he fired just went to the competition, taking their often years or even decades of contacts, experience and knowledge with them.

Most, it seems, went quietly, but two - both unnamed - did not. One set his sales book on fire and threw it in his ex-boss's face, the other, deciding to take early retirement over his abuse at the hands of the general manager, left him a caustic note: "Dear Jose. I quit. Fuck you." It would be something of a vast understatement to say that Jose Menendez was neither popular nor liked at Hertz, and this would be the pattern of his working life as he slowly built up his commercial empire. Though nobody could fault his work ethic, one grudging compliment coming from the chief executive of Hertz, Robert Stone, who noted "I never knew anyone who worked  harder, worked more towards goals." However Adrian Bulman, one of the managers, had a different view: "I'm surprised," he remarked, "that in an industry as tough as this one somebody didn't punch him out."

Jose's arrogance and condescending behaviour even extended to deciding how his employees should wear their hair, as he snapped to a junior, taking an instant dislike to his curly hair, that he didn't want to see him wearing that style again. Warren Hudson, who had formed an initial good impression of Jose when he met him to be interviewed for a job at Hertz, quickly changed his opinion once he was working for him, remarking that he would have been glad to have killed the man. This was the kind of reaction Jose's blunt, uncaring, all but abusive treatment of his employees engendered in almost anyone who crossed his path. To say he was not a nice man is probably like saying Hitler and the Jews had their differences. It's hard to see how anyone could have liked him, but like every powerful man of industry, he cultivated, if not friendships, then acquaintances. After all, you don't have to like a guy to know he's going to make you money, and that being on his right side is a good way to go.

Jose was well known and hated for what could probably be described as a "night of the long knives", to take the Hitler imagery a step further, quarterly review meetings where, if your figures weren't up to scratch you could find yourself heading out the door, no matter how long you had been with the company, no matter your excuses. Blood on the boardroom carpet was almost a literal thing with Jose; he spared no-one. In fact, it's probably fairer and more accurate to compare him to Stalin than Hitler. Hitler didn't particularly care about his underlings, knew little about them and dumped them as their usefulness ran out. But like the great Russian dictator, Jose made it his business to know everything there was to know about his people, even going to the rather ludicrous and surely unnecessary lengths of travelling the country incognito to spy on them.

In truth, and to bring things slightly more up to date (though at the time such a figure was unknown of course) he emulated Tony Soprano, his constant mantra at the meetings "Where's my fucking money?" You can almost visualise him kicking the shit - verbally, or maybe literally - out of the unfortunate, terrified executives who failed to come up to scratch. Other images come to mind of Jose walking behind one salesman who had particularly displeased him, with a baseball bat...

Why was Jose Menendez such a bastard? Was it a case of taking revenge on the sneering, upper-class nobs who had looked down upon him when he was at SIU? A reaction to the looks of disbelief, shock, and perhaps even snarky pity when Kitty announced she was going out with, and then marrying the young Cuban? Was he showing them all he was as good as, if not better than them? That might have been part of it, but it doesn't explain why he would be so hard on his sons later on, treatment which would ironically lend credence and substance to their insistence that they were being abused. Personally, I just think he was just what is known in the trade as a fucker; he was a nasty piece of work, a man who, without the aptitude for figures he possessed and without the drive he had, might have ended up in some street gang, his blood oozing away in an alley in Queens as he contemplated the waste of his life.

But whatever the reason, though it would make him rich and feared, Jose would never be liked, never truly respected. Everywhere he went he was a dictator, with no regard for people's feelings, no tact, no humility, accepting no excuses and always looking at the bottom line. He was, in other words, the typical hard-nosed, no-nonsense, heartless and unfeeling businessman the corporate world throws out by the handsful, ready and willing to plunder, rape and kill (figuratively, at least for the last two) in the pure pursuit of money and power. So in 1970s America, though an immigrant from a socialist country, he fit right in.

Hudson was so humiliated by Mendendez that he wrote to his sons after the murder, saying "Having worked under your father and been on the receiving end of more than one of his tirades and having been witness to his destroying people in business meetings, actually reducing grown men to tears, I was wondering if I could ask you a question? . . . I was just wondering if Jose was a whimpering piece of shit when the other guy(s) had the big guns and all the power on their side, or if he was still super macho, Mr. Arrogance and spit in their eye. When all the stories came out about the Beverly Hills police department 'interviewing' everyone who might have a motive for killing Jose, I called them to ask why they never contacted me . . . and lots of other Hertz people. . . . I explained to them that I would have done the job for nothing, but at the least, I wanted to shake the hand of the actual killer(s)."

That might seem an odd thing to write to boys supposedly shocked and grieving the deaths of their parents, but it does show the kind of long-lasting hatred Jose could engender in people, and with good cause. Given his reputation, and all the people he crossed, ruined, destroyed and humbled over the years, it's doubtful too many people mourned his passing, even if they paid lip-service at the funeral.

Jose had as little regard for his customers as he did for his staff. During the Oil Crisis of 1979, Jose responded to the rise in inflation and oil prices by unilaterally raising rental rates by a whopping four percent. To him, the bottom line was all that mattered. When told by one of his executives that a particular strategy would work, yes, in the short term but backfire in two years and cost the company money, he shrugged, telling the executive it didn't matter, as he would no longer be working for Hertz. In Jose's mind, if he was not there in charge then it was not his problem. He would have made a great politician!

[Trollheart]

By 1979 Jose was executive vice president of Hertz nationwide, and the family had moved to a beautiful new home on Pennington Lake in Princeton. Here Jose had a tennis court built, and here he would train and drill his now two young boys until they were Olympic class tennis players. Nothing else would do. Jose had been a swimmer and a tennis player in his youth, though without a real aptitude for either, but that wasn't going to stop him. Nothing ever did, until a hail of bullets did the job. Allen Fite, small fleet sales manager for Hertz's Atlanta region, said that for many people who knew Jose when he was a young lion, his death was not much of a surprise. "It was kind of funny," said Fite. "When this happened, people were calling other people within Hertz saying, 'You didn't do it, did you?'" Another employee remarked "The joke was, when he was killed, everybody needed an excuse to prove they were not in L.A." Others, however, said there would be so many suspects among the people who had been broken by Jose over the years that the police would never solve the crime.

You don't get to where Jose was without making a few enemies along the way, but this man had all but gone out of his way to do so, cultivating no friendships and provoking everyone he could, so that rather like when Mr. Burns was shot, Lisa's words "Everyone in town is a suspect" rang eerily true. I'm sure the prevailing - if not openly expressed - feeling was that the bastard had finally got what was coming to him. One is also reminded of Dickens' A Christmas Carol, where Scrooge, shown his future by the final spirit, the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come, sees his business associates chuckling over his death (although of course he doesn't at the time realise it's him they're talking about) as they grin "I see Old Scratch got his man at last, eh?"
Indeed.

But before his - not quite untimely - death there were worlds to conquer, and Jose Menendez would not be satisfied with the simple executive vice presidency of a car hire firm, even if it was the biggest in the world. In fact, he was forced out of Hertz the very next year, when a new President of US Operations came in and Jose was reassigned to RCA, the big record label owned by the parent company. Sent to L.A. to talk to lawyers and musicians, it was here he made perhaps one of the only friends he had ever had, or ever would. In 1981 Jose was given the task of turning the "joke label" around. RCA was known for signing old, tired acts such as Kenny Rogers and Diana Ross, who were well past it but still got paid exorbitant sums for their albums. Jose knew nothing about music, but set to the task with his by now characteristic determination and his contempt for failure.

Perhaps surprisingly, as a man who had been a feared and hated tyrant at Hertz, Jose was able to command great loyalty at RCA and was actually well liked. That didn't of course mean he went any easier on people when it suited him to brandish the whip. Angry at his vice president for American sales, Don Ellis, who had been delayed to a meeting through no fault of his own, he sent a snippy note to the man, who, angry himself at such treatment, and having reluctantly relocated from the UK at Jose's behest, resigned in fury. However worries, or snide predictions, of RCA being too much for Jose proved completely unfounded. He coaxed the Eurythmics back to the label at a time when they were reaching the height of their fame, and did the same for Jefferson Starship, who by now had dropped the first part of their name, having gone from being The Jefferson Airplane to just Jefferson Airplane and then Jefferson Starship, now just Starship. Under this name they had their biggest hits ever, including two number one singles and an album that sold over a million units. Suddenly, RCA was looking less of a joke to its rivals.

And then he fucked up big time.

His arrogance and overbearing confidence in his own ability led him to sign a Puerto Rican boyband - before boybands were even a thing - and it almost broke him. It could be said, perhaps, that his success with Starship and The Eurythmics was more down to a knowledge of business (which it could not be denied he had) and the stars' response to that; the equivalent of two sides of a deal who both knew what was best for each other, a business arrangement. But with Menudo, the Latin band he signed, his lack of experience in, knowledge of and appreciation for the music industry was thrown into sharp relief. Jose Menendez had come to RCA with no interest in music, and no experience running a record label or even managing a band. He probably didn't even really know who Annie Lennox was, beyond a cheque to be written.

His idea, at its heart, was sound. Latin music was certainly about to make a big splash, with artists like Gloria Estefan and later Ricky Martin ready to bring their own brand of salsa pop to the world outside of Latin America. But Menudo were not a band, just an industry-manufactured future echo of any of the boy and girlbands put together by the likes of Stock, Aiken and Waterman and later Simon Cowell and Louis Walsh - kids who could fulfill a need, plug a gap in the market, but who had no real music talent and were replaced once they reached age sixteen and ceased to become attractive to the label's teenybopper fanbase. It was fine to do that on the streets of San Juan, where Menudo were superstars, but American audiences saw right through them.

Jose is rumoured to have lavished anything from ten to thirty million on the band, provided them with a private jet and, as one commentator waggishly claimed, "half the country", and for nothing in the end. Jose did not turn RCA around, to his disgust (and no doubt he would blame other factors, never willing to admit defeat or that he had taken on a job too tough for him) and at age forty-one he was executive vice president in charge of video sales, ready to lift the first building blocks in the next stage of creating his empire and his legacy.

Goodfellas: A Blooming Business

Jose's next project was the one which would make his name, and bring him into contact with people even more famous than the musicians and producers he had been working with at RCA. Carolco, most famous perhaps for managing Sylvester Stallone, bought a twenty-five percent interest in pornbroker-turned-legitimate-video-distributer Noel Bloom's International Video Entertainment, one of the provisos being that they could bring in their own financial expert, who turned out to be none other than Jose Menendez. In 1986 Bloom was linked with Michael Zaffarno, a capo (boss) of the Galante crime family, and under investigation thanks to his sales of porn videos, which was how he had made his money initially. Trying to distance himself, both from the connections with the mafia and gangsters in general, and with the porn industry, seen as less acceptable in the tail-end of the eighties with the demise of the permissive society and the end of free love, Bloom had started IVE in an attempt to "go straight" and be taken seriously.

It was Jose's old - and possibly only - friend, John Mason, who had put him in touch with Peter Hoffman in Carolco, who had in turn given him the job at IVE. Upset at having missed out on the top spot at RCA when a new president was brought in over him (as had happened at Hertz) Jose had been considering moving west when Hoffman's call saved him. As was often the case with Jose Menendez, he made a good impression on Bloom, who liked him, but as was also almost always the case this impression did not last as Jose quickly began to show his true colours. His first move, as ever, was to fire, fire, fire, and in a short time he had more than halved the staff at IVE. As had always been his way, he consulted nobody, including Bloom, who was technically his boss, merely telling him why these people had to go, not asking for his permission or agreement, and turning a deaf and contemptuous ear to any arguments.

Then, as again he had done up till then, Jose set his sights on the top job. He was brought in as financial manager, but he wanted creative control. This was Bloom's area, and there could only be one victor in such a struggle. Within a few months Bloom had decided it was not worth the daily fights - Jose had already excised the "adult entertainment" part of the company, something Bloom may have had a fondness for, having been how he started - and told Jose he could buy him out. As ever, Jose did not let it rest at that, but dragged Bloom maliciously through court cases as he refused to hand over money he did not believe his ex-boss was due.

The small coincidence of the trial taking place, and still having been running, when Jose and his wife were murdered served to shift some of the suspicion for their deaths onto Bloom and his supposed Mafia connections, something which suited the two sons down to the ground. In some ways, it couldn't have worked out better for them if they had planned it. Disgruntled partner, bought out against his will, denied his payout and no fan of Jose, in the middle of a battle to get those funds and having been publicly  humiliated by Menendez at court, sees the case suddenly stall as Jose is killed. Coincidence? Surely not.

In actual fact, Bloom had already won the case; this was merely an appeal, and Jose had said all he was going to be allowed to say. He had testified, and was not required to do so again. Carolco, feeling bad (they said) about the murders, offered to pay up. Bloom, worried about how this would look to the press and to the cops, asked them to wait, but for whatever reason they would not, and his fears grew about the picture that would be painted of him, and how the sudden settlement would be viewed by those in authority, by the brothers and by the public at large.

The Sons

Kitty Menendez only had two children, and they were both boys. They would forge the kind of relationship with each other than only brothers can, each almost acting as an only child, each spoiled beyond measure, each believed by both parents to be a cut above everyone else's children, indulged and flattered, but also mercilessly criticised and strictly disciplined to a level almost unthought of outside of perhaps the army or a strict boarding school. They would later both claim that it was this treatment, coupled with completely unproven accusations of sexual abuse not only from their father but also their mother, and fear for their very lives, which drove them to strike first, killing both their parents in a desperate attempt to save themselves from being killed.

Lyle Menendez

Lyle was the elder, born January 10 1968 as Joseph Lyle Menendez, and would always be known by his second name. He wouldn't have to wait too long for a playmate, with his brother born a mere two years later, though the word play would not really be allowed to exist in the world of the two Menendez children, not if their father had anything to do with it. And he did. From the very beginning Jose had seen his first son as a tiny version of himself, a lump of soft clay he could mould in his own image, a boy he could turn into a man like him. Though nowhere as good, of course: Jose Menendez would never accept any equal, not even his own son. He had their lives laid out for them, whether they wanted it or not. They would excel at tennis, like he had not, going on to compete in - and win, damn it! Who cared about taking part? The winning was what was important! - the Olympics, vindicating their proud father's belief in them.

Like tiny soldiers under a particularly brutal drill sergeant, the boys were ordered to make sure not an hour of any day was wasted. They had to learn about politics, combat, business, sport, and life lessons that would stand them in good stead later in life. Jose, of course, did not trust them to do these things on their own, and so he directed every moment of their waking days himself, setting schedules, activities, training. There was no room for friends, no room for play. That was for the weak, and Jose Menendez's sons would never be seen as weak by anyone. Not if he could help it.

Kitty was not a lot better. She indulged her sons to excess, never believing or accepting they could do wrong, the kind of mother who, when presented with irrefutable evidence of a crime committed by her son would shake her head stubbornly and close the door in your face. Nothing would ever convince her that her sons were at fault for anything. She allowed them to run free when out, risking being hit by traffic if they ran out into the road, but justifying her attitude by saying that physical hurt was preferable to fear; bones would mend (she obviously never considered worse than that occurring) but a scared mind would remain scared all its days. But though she indulged them, she was far from the ideal mother. She had no real nurturing or maternal instinct, and was quite happy to allow Lyle and his brother to walk around with dirty nappies rather than change them. She'd get around to it; it wasn't of pressing importance.

She even tried to farm her kids off on Jose's mother, as having them around got in the way of the ski holidays she and her husband regularly took, but Jose put paid to the idea of them living full time during the week with anyone else, even his mother.


Just around the time of Erik's birth the family had moved back to Illinois and Jose was taken on at Lyons, as detailed above. Erik proved an exuberant, excitable child who would rush out heedless of any danger, and whose behaviour his parents did not seek to correct, believing this was how young boys should behave. Their young boys, at any rate. But as you might expect, while things were relatively calm on the surface, below there was disquiet and danger. Jose closely examined his boys - Lyle mostly, as Erik was at this time too young to be able to join in or be part of the ritual - quizzing him on current events, and sending him researching the answers if he had not got them, sneering at him when he took too long. Enforced isolation in their rooms was one punishment, though nowhere near as bad as being trapped in there with their tyrant father while Jose took them apart psychologically, breaking them down and reshaping them in his image. He used physical punishment too, but it's to be believed the boys feared the dreaded belt less than their father's snarling voice, dripping with disapproval and mockery of their efforts.

Kitty never interfered in the punishment of the boys, be it physical or psychological. She may not always have agreed with it, but she convinced herself Jose was right, as he had conditioned her to. Jose was so arrogant and sure about his methods that he didn't notice - or care - that it began to adversely affect the boys. Erik developed a bad stutter, which infuriated his father, who took it as a sign of weakness and all but accused the boy of making it happen on purpose. Both boys acquired nasty, violent tempers, and slowly but surely their emotions were all but leeched out of them as they were in effect made into robotic copies of their domineering father. Kitty took to drinking and taking valium pills, unable or unwilling to face up to her responsibility as a mother and protector of her children

[Trollheart]

Anyone for tennis?

Having chosen the career of tennis for his sons (well, technically they were allowed choose, but only between that and soccer, and they chose tennis) Jose drilled them as hard as he ever had, determined they would be the best. From sunrise to almost late afternoon they would have to practice, practice, practice and then spend the evening being browbeaten and lectured by the man who could do no wrong, and intended his sons should not be allowed to either. He would cure them of the weakness he saw in their eyes, little realising, or caring, that what he saw there was fear, fear of him, fear of disappointing him and inviting his anger. Even professional coaches he hired himself weren't good enough to teach his boys, and Jose would regularly contradict them, running out from the house to dispense unwanted advice and orders.

However, the two boys did well in the sport, winning state championships when they were sixteen and fourteen respectively, but even this was not enough for Jose, who pushed and pushed as if he never believed his kids would push back. And they did. One day, Lyle just shouted at his taunting father "Why don't you just shut up?" He received a broken nose for his trouble, and the promise that if he ever spoke to his father like that again, Jose would kill him. The double standard was almost funny: Jose could belittle and jeer and all but abuse his kids, but should they dare assert their manhood and stand up to him, they were for it. He had spent most of their lives trying to toughen them up, but was not okay with them turning that toughness on him. He saw it both as a betrayal and a challenge to his undisputed authority and supremacy in the family.

The boys would frequently lose it on the tennis court if things did not go their way, throwing down their racquets, stamping and screaming McEnroe-style, and the parents weren't much better. The entire family was an unwelcome sight at most tournaments, despite the boys' considerable talent, and an indication that trouble was to follow. Kitty in particular didn't much care about rules if they went against her sons, would make her objections known at some histrionic volume, and Jose of course thought he knew better than the professionals.

When Lyle went to Princeton he found himself suddenly no longer a leading light, no longer the one others stood in awe of, no longer better than everyone else. He was just another arrogant rich kid who thought the world belonged to him, but on walking through the doors of the venerable college was swiftly disabused of this notion. The biggest wake-up call (or it should have been, to anyone else) was his suspension for a year after copying another student's work for a test. Even his blustering, threatening father could not change the minds of the faculty, who gave Jose no more respect than they would the parent of any other student - here, Jose too for perhaps the first time was made to feel as if he were ordinary, and he did not like it - and the suspension stood. Lyle therefore left Princeton.

The matter was hushed up, and the family pretended Lyle was still at college, however eventually Jose had to find something for the boy to do, and so he set him to work at his new video company, LIVE, from which he had ousted Noel Bloom. But while he had been driven by his father mercilessly on the tennis court and even at the dinner table, Lyle had been brought up by his mother to understand he did not have to work, that things would be done for him, that he would never suffer academically, and this was the attitude he took into business. Not interested in working, he did as little as possible. Unpopular, lazy, inefficient, and no protection offered to him from the boss his father, he didn't last long.

When he finally returned to Princeton, he found he had an acolyte. Donovan Goodreau was pulled in, completely under his spell, and they became great friends, Goodreau seeing Lyle as his svengali. He even did his homework and assignments for him, taking the place of Kitty, who now could no longer shield her son from the horror of having to actually do his own work. But like the few friends he cultivated over his life - more adherents really, disciples - Lyle either got bored with Donovan or just wanted to hurt him. He spread a rumour around Princeton that Goodreau was responsible for a series of petty thefts, and though his friend denied it, Lyle ordered him out, and back to New Jersey he went. Minus his wallet, which Lyle held up triumphantly, ready to go on a spending spree he could easily have afforded with his own money. But for Lyle Menendez, it wasn't spending that was fun, it was spending someone else's money without their permission. Theft, in other words. He was already well on the way to being a criminal.

"My brother's a god. I worship the ground Lyle walks on." - Erik Menendez

Erik Menendez

The contrast between the two brothers was startling. Perhaps because their father had had longer to "mould" his eldest son into the kind of man he believed he could and should be, Erik was left somewhat unbothered by the rampaging maniac attention of his father. Either as a result of this, or perhaps it was his nature, Erik was as dissimilar to his older brother as it was possible for two children to be. While people who met Lyle commented on his coldness, his detachedness, the blank stare in his eyes (the eyes of a killer?), cultivated no doubt by years of the pressure his father had heaped on his young shoulders, of the sparks that flew between them and, in reality, of his acceptance that his father's way was the right one, Erik was far gentler and more, well, human. He rescued abandoned animals, wrote poetry and loved nature. He was, perhaps, everything Jose Menendez despised in a man, or a boy, and to some degree friends believed that Jose, having his heir in Lyle, did not care so much for Erik, and he was called "the throwaway child".

It's quite possible - though unproven - that Jose never even wanted a second child. Luckily it wasn't a girl, as who knows what the ultimate chauvinist misogynist would have done with that hand, had he been dealt it? But all he really wanted was someone he could control and shape, another him, a legacy he could leave behind, something of himself to live on after, despite his arrogance he knew he would, he died. In this way Erik escaped the worst of the treatment, looked on as an afterthought by his brutal father, and allowed to live his life the way he wanted to. Mostly. This isn't to say he was given anything like actual freedom, or exempted from the harsh discipline Jose meted out, but his father's eyes were always first and foremost locked on his eldest son, and his younger child was able to fly somewhat below the radar.

While Jose cared little for him, Erik's mother pampered him, doing his homework for him, helping him to cheat on exams and even forging a false ID for him when underage so that he could go drinking with his new girlfriend (she made one for her too). Initially worried about the boy's sexual orientation - he was still playing with teddy bears and other stuffed animals up to his fourteenth year - Kitty did everything she could to encourage the relationship between Erik and Jan, and push it towards its inevitable result. At Calabasa High School Erik made his own friends but they noted that he had a dark, somewhat sadistic side to him. One who noticed but didn't care, was in fact attracted to this side of Erik was the man who would become his best friend, Craig Cignarelli. A scion of the MGM dynasty, Cignarelli had the world on a string and he knew it. The word playboy might have been coined to describe him; easy-going, handsome, confident to a fault bordering on arrogance, and a lady's man, he became all but Erik's mentor.

Together they wrote the screenplay for "Friends" which would be referred to so frequently at the trial of the two brothers, and used as proof that Erik and Lyle had masterminded and then executed the killing of their parents, not on a whim, but as a cold and calculated plan to get their hands on their father's money. It would be presented as a form of premeditation, evidence that their minds worked in this way, and that, far from being harmless fiction, it was in effect a confession for their future crime. Indeed, Cignarelli and Erik had often discussed how to get away with the perfect crime, though that crime was not always murder.

Erik and Cignarelli had a run in with a local gang, which resulted in trouble following them home. Jose, the tough man who took no shit from anyone, the consummate bully who believed himself better and stronger than any other man, who had destroyed careers and lives and marriages without a second thought, feared his boy getting on the wrong side of the criminal underworld, and also worried probably about Noel Bloom's reported association with gangland figures, and uncharacteristically told Erik to drop it.

[Trollheart]

II: Pre-emptive Strike? Blood Brothers: Murder in Paradise

The night of August 20 1989 was, like most California nights, warm and muggy. Cold didn't seem to have a pass to get into Beverly Hills; it was almost as if it was an unwritten but strictly observed rule that it must always be sunny and warm there. Think about it: have you ever seen footage of the playground of the rich and famous where it was raining? Or even cold? It was as if Beverly Hills was exempted from bad weather, given special dispensation in this as it is in about every other area, including, usually, crime. Beverly Hills exists as a kind of almost fairy land, detached and separate from the rest of Los Angeles, the rest of California, and certainly the rest of America. There could have been signs outside the city limits: Inclement weather, criminals, beggars, homeless people, loud music, drugs not wanted here. (Well maybe drugs). Keep walking.

But crime was about to ignore that sign with a sneer and the click of shotguns being cocked, and fill the pleasant, balmy air with the sharp stench of cordite and the smell of roasting human flesh, the stink of blood and treachery. Striding confidently through the big iron gates and on towards the French doors of the white three million plus villa, death was coming on inexorable feet. No alarm buzzed, though the Mendendezes had one of the most expensive systems in America, the villa having once been occupied by rock royalty such as Prince and Elton John. But Jose always forgot to switch the alarm on, and tonight was no exception. It would, however, be the last time he forgot.

Death had come to Beverly Hills that night.

Having nodded off in front of the television, Jose was slumped comfortably on the sofa, head back, while Kitty had also fallen asleep, so neither heard the tread of their killers as they advanced up the garden path. Had they done, and even had they stiffened for a moment in dread anticipation, they would surely have relaxed once they recognised their two boys, though perhaps for a fleeting instant they might possibly have wondered what Lyle and Erik were doing with shotguns?

Such thoughts would not have passed through the mind of the family dog, Rudy, could animals reason in that way. This was just the two young masters come home. Nothing to worry about. No need to raise the canine alarm.

One of the brother raised his Mossberg shotgun and fired. The first two shots missed, hitting the wall, one shot hammering into a tree in the garden, and the concussion of the impact pulled Jose from his sleep, one bleary moment before he returned to if, never to awaken again. The fourth shot hit him in the elbow as he yelled "No no no!" and then two more took him in the arm. But these were minor wounds, and to ensure his father was dead, Lyle walked behind him, placed the barrel of the shotgun against his head and squeezed the trigger. People had remarked upon Jose's hard-headedness, but even the scourge of many boardrooms could not stand up to the direct impact of a shotgun blast, and half that hard head was blown away. Jose slumped forward, dead.

Not surprisingly, the sound of her husband being killed woke Kitty up.


(I'm not kidding: this is quite graphic. Proceed at your own risk)

She stared, for a moment stupefied into frozen inaction, unable to believe what she was seeing. Then she made a run for it. She didn't get far. Two or three shots took her and one shattering her arm brought her down, like a felled deer. Kitty did not die easily. She struggled to her feet and made off again, but her killer followed her, took her down with another shot and then stood over her, methodically blasting her from leg to shoulder, firing shot after shot. She collapsed, but amazingly was not yet dead and continued to try to crawl away. They had run out of ammunition, so the brothers went outside and reloaded. Coming back in, one of them leaned over the coffee table, pointing the shotgun down at her and blew her head away, sending her to finally join her husband in the afterlife. No doubt Jose would have found a way to criticise the method of execution. "Too long and messy," he might have moaned. "Do a quick job, get it over with and get out before the cops arrive."

The cops, however, did not arrive. Nobody had heard the shots. The television was on loud enough to disguise the sounds, and the villa was set back enough from the main road that a casual passerby would have been unlikely to have heard anything, and if they did would probably think it was fireworks or a car backfiring, or indeed, sounds from the television, where James Bond, unaware of and immune to the real-life slaughter taking place around him, was busily making love to a spy.

Before they left, the brothers made sure to kneecap both of their parents. Why, did not seem obvious at the time, but this was a well-planned and carefully thought-out murder, and they had their reasons, as would become clear. Their work done, the two brothers departed, but not before carefully collecting the shell casings.

As perhaps a final insult to their parents, and obviously to remove suspicion from them, the two boys then returned to the house, "discovered" the grisly scene, and immediately called the police.

Well, no, not immediately. The boys arrived back around 11:00 PM but it was almost midnight when Lyle, as the elder, made the call. This, too, would come into their later trial. There could certainly be a certain amount of delay allowed as the reality set in, the shock causing those who found the bodies to delay, but almost an hour later? If you or I came home and found our parents or wife or family brutally murdered, wouldn't you be on the blower right away? I know I would. But they waited. What were they waiting for? A last check around to ensure they hadn't left any incriminating evidence, a final "deep clean" of the crime scene before the professional forensics team arrived?

In perhaps another odd move, after the 911 call the first person they called was not Jose's mother, not any of the family or friends, but... Erik's tennis coach, who lived in Santa Monica. Hardly the first name, you would think, that would come to mind as you look at your dead parents sprawled in front of you and wait for the police to arrive. They then made sure to put on a show when the cops did get there, running out in tears and banging the pavement and crying and howling, Erik mostly. Lyle was the more controlled of the two, and when it came to time to be questioned by the police, he would be the one to hold it together while his younger brother seemed to fall apart.

When the Smoke Clears: Interrogation and Investigation

Detective Les Zoeller was called in off his vacation to take charge; murders were all but unknown in Beverly Hills, but when they occurred the residents demanded all of the police resources, and there was no such thing as "wait and see". Whether the killing involved the possibility of other victims being targeted, or whether it was just causing a bad stink, reputation-wise, in the most desired address in America, the great and the good were not going to allow any delays or be fobbed off by junior investigators. This crime had to be solved, pronto. And Zoeller knew that, as did his boss, which was probably why he, as the top homicide detective (of two) in the BHPD, was told to cut his holiday short and report to the Menendez residence, now a charnel house.

Like the beat cops who had responded first to the 911 call, he  agreed that this was no ordinary murder, nor was it a robbery gone wrong. "Someone was sending a message," opined one of the cops. The level of damage, particularly in Kitty's case, spoke of unbridled anger and rage, a very personal score being settled in the most final and bloody way possible. The brothers were not yet considered suspects, but were interviewed, where they reacted in two entirely different ways, both consistent with their personalities. No sense could be got out of Erik, who even asked for confirmation that his mother and father were dead, and kept asking after the family dog. His interview was terminated after twenty minutes as it was useless to try to question him; he was hysterical and making no sense. Lyle on the other hand answered all questions with a cool and calm detachment that must have sounded some sort of warning bell in the cops' minds, though it would be some time before that would become a klaxon, impossible to ignore.

Already though, odd inconsistencies were showing up in the boys' stories (well, in Lyle's, as nobody could get any sort of answer out of Erik). First, they claimed they had earlier gone into town with the intention of going to see the new James Bond movie. Was it coincidence that their parents had been watching one of 007's earlier efforts before their brains had been splattered all over their living room? And they mentioned that when they arrived back they saw and smelled smoke, presumably from the multiple shotgun discharges. But this was an hour later, and any smoke in the air had already dissipated, as confirmed by the investigating officers, who saw no such clouds of smoke such as the brothers spoke of. Lyle mentioned that his mother had been on the verge of suicide, but neglected to tell his interrogators about the several attempts she had already made to take her own life.

When asked if they had any idea who might want to hurt their parents, Lyle advanced a theory that, while far-fetched, the cops had already considered. He said the "mob" had "hit" their father because he would not play ball with them, and his wife had been collateral damage. This did fit in with the apparently professional style of the killing, and the kneecappings were another indication that this was a gangland thing. However one action should have given them pause.

After they had been released, the boys requested permission to return to the house to pick up their tennis racquets! Dedication and professionalism is all well and good, but when your parents are smoking corpses, who thinks of going back to the scene of the crime on what is, on the face of it, an extremely trivial errand? It's not even as if either of them was playing in a tournament (from which you would have thought they would have asked to have been excused on compassionate grounds anyway) - they just wanted to practice. I mean, come on. That doesn't sit right, whether you suspect them or not. That has to raise eyebrows.

The memorial service was set for August 25, five days later, autopsies completed and presumably whatever the funeral directors' offices could do to mitigate the awful carnage wreaked on the two bodies and make them presentable as human beings. Almost fulfilling the old adage, the brothers were late for the funeral. Not theirs of course, but that of their parents. This in itself show a lack of respect and regard for their mother and father, and a discourtesy to the many hundreds waiting to say their last goodbyes. It also validates what their father had taught them: to always be in control, drive the narrative and never let anyone tell you what to do. What he would have thought about them taking his advice in these circumstances, we can only guess.

With characteristic lack of feeling and complete arrogance, Lyle made it clear that he intended to take over as his father's heir, to become head of LIVE. He didn't know at this stage what Jose had put in his will, but he knew that he stood next in line, like a prince taking over from his father the king, and never considered there might be others who were expecting, planning or hoping for the top job, now that the tyrant had fallen.

The mob connection looked stronger when the name Noel Bloom came to the attention of the cops, and they also considered a guy called Morris Levy, whom Jose had cheated in a deal to buy out his chain of video stores, in which it was said another powerful Mafia family, none other than the Genoveses, one of the Five New York Families, had a share. Settling on the almost accepted scenario, LIVE paid for an expensive hotel room for Lyle and Erik, as police were concerned the mob might come after them.

The actual funeral was to be held in the university chapel at Princeton, ironic as it was from here that Lyle had been booted for a year following the copying scandal, and it was a place he hated. Still, like everything in the Menendez family, it was all about the perception, the image, and so the brothers laid their parents to rest in New Jersey, eager to have the bodies cremated. Theories began to surface as people questioned the possibility of Jose's involvement in organised crime, and how he could have made the money he had by legitimate means? His political aspirations told against him too, as another wild idea was that he intended to return to his homeland and oust Castro, taking over and pledging his country's loyalty to the USA. The belief was then that Castro had sent goons to America to take him out before he had a chance to return.

And then, there was the intended purchase of that island in Miami, a perfect place from which to operate and oversee  a drug or gun-running operation. His family were in New York, home of the Five Families. To some people, all these pieces began to fall into place, especially as gang graffiti found on the mansion wall seemed to indicate a beef with one of the local crews. Nevertheless, both of the main suspects, or at least links to organised crime which Zoeller had in the frame turned out to be a bust, and they were back to square one. Then he spoke to Pete Wiere.

Pete was a friend of the family, and his reply to the not-at-all-leading question as to who he believed responsible surprised and shocked the detective. "I have no basis for this," admitted Wiere, shrugging almost apologetically, as if he expected his idea to be laughed at, "but I wonder if the boys did it." It was such a strange thing to say, and all Wiere could give to back it up was a suspicion that the brothers were "too perfect." On September 17 Zoeller went to interview Carlos Baralt, and was again surprised to find that, having been unable to interview the brothers - they would not return his calls -  one of them was there, and shortly afterwards the other turned up too, so the detective was able to interview them, with neither having time to consult with the other so as to prepare a story. Trouble was, Zoeller had not been expecting this stroke of good fortune and was also unprepared.

But he was a cop with decades of experience behind him, even if Beverly Hills didn't do much to challenge his skills. This was a chance to use them, and use them he did. He quizzed Lyle on whether falling asleep in front of the television was something his parents had done normally. If so, he pointed out, this would have to be known to someone familiar to them, so that they would be able to take them by surprise. Lyle was non-committal, evasive. Erik seemed more concerned that the cops were now working, it seemed, on a theory of the killers having been known to his parents, which might place them right back in the frame. They had done all they could to deflect suspicion onto the shadowy mob, but with the two strikes against that theory in the dismissal as suspects of Bloom and Levy, that line of enquiry was beginning to look less and less likely.

Now Zoeller began to carefully probe the boys' relationship with their parents, their girlfriends and how their parents had reacted to them, and at the end of the interview admitted to them that he really felt the gangland theory held very little water. They shakily agreed. Nevertheless, when reporters interviewed them Lyle began pushing the organised crime idea again. Personally, it seems odd to me (I don't know if they felt the same way) that the supposedly grieving and shocked brothers should conduct the interview, not only in the same house in which their parents were murdered - they had plenty of money and could have rented a place, even bought a new house, but they chose to remain at the family home - but in the very room in which the deed was carried out. The reporters were sitting in the crime scene itself (cleared now of course) and they and Lyle and Erik were seated on the same sofas that had been drenched with their father's blood. Well, probably not the actual sofas themselves, but ones placed in the same position and occupying the same space. It must have felt eerie, like at any moment two gunmen were about to burst through the doors and start firing shotguns.

Whether to wrong-foot the press, or in an attempt to head off what he may have seen as the beginnings of suspicions turning their way, Lyle then claimed he had information that the police were looking at Bloom as a suspect. In fact, they had already discounted him and indeed the whole mob hit angle. He then went on to confuse the reporters by claiming he wasn't really that interested in finding out who killed his parents, rationalising this as the powerlessness to make them pay other than seeing them go to jail. He said it would be worse knowing and to be unable to avenge them, than not knowing. This did not sit well with the journalists, nor did Lyle's next-to-inauguration speech, as he waxed lyrical about how he saw the company progressing under his leadership. By the time the interview was over, both reporters were of the same mind.

Those brothers killed their parents.

[Trollheart]

You knew this was coming....


III. Beverly Hills Cops: No Laughing Matter

The initial investigation was pretty much a shambles. To some degree, this wasn't the fault of the cops. As mentioned, in Beverly Hills about the only action a cop would get might be if someone's expensive pedigree dog got lost, or maybe a domestic row, though it's hard really to think of anyone daring to disturb the almost sepulchral quiet of the exclusive area. So they were not qualified, nor experienced enough to investigate a major murder like this, and that led to some pretty big errors that would come back to haunt them, and lead to delays in the arrest of the brothers.

First, they failed to administer a gunshot residue test to Lyle and Erik at the scene. This would have shown that they had both recently fired weapons, which would be difficult for the brothers to explain. A normal police force would have suspected everyone, no matter their status or relationship to the deceased, and don't they say that in many cases the culprit is always close to home? Didn't they know that the Menendez brothers stood to gain a fortune if their parents died? Did they even probe the strained relationships within the family? None of these questions seem to have occurred to them, which is bad enough, but when Zoeller refused Lyle permission to enter the house the day after the murder - on the pretext of getting his tennis racquet but in reality to check his car for evidence they might have forgotten to dispose of - a later trip was successful, when a cop told him it was okay.

Why did the cop do this? Had Zoeller not given orders that the crime scene - and that would include the car - had been sealed and that nobody was to enter? Even if he had not, is this not Policing 101? What sort of idiot risks his job by granting access to the scene to what could be potentially a suspect? And how, in the name of all that's holy, did an entire police team - admittedly a BHPD one but still - miss shell casings, wrappings for the shells and other incriminating evidence that was still in the car the next day? Did nobody think to check the car? Really?

Erik and Lyle may have thought they were master criminals, and revelled in and congratulated themselves on getting away with the perfect murder (and robbery really, as they had essentially stolen their inheritance) but after the killing they were as far from unobtrusive and calm as it's possible to be. Erik kept jabbering on, nervously dropping hints about what they had done to friends who, luckily for them, discounted his words as just a symptom of the shock he was in. Then the two brothers phoned the gun store where they had bought the shotguns, out of state. They asked about the CCTV footage: when was it kept till? Why would anyone who had nothing to hide want to know this?

As might be expected, the two went wild spending their ill-gotten gains, and there was little if any remorse for or even remembrance of the two people who had brought them up, now just twin piles of ashes in urns. Lyle even got in a computer expert to erase files on Kitty's computer, one in particular titled WILL. Perhaps he was afraid his parents had been about to write the two of them out of their will, and while a screen detailing changes would not be legally binding, it might very well provide a partial motive for the boys killing their parents, if it was proved that they had known about it. Unable to get at the file - which was corrupted - Lyle ensured it was completely erased from the computer.

Ken Soble and his friend who had interviewed the boys for their paper went to see Glenn Stevens, a name Lyle had given them when asked for a list of their friends they could interview or speak to. Stevens was angry at Lyle, who had begun to emulate his late father and was condescending about his friend, denigrating him and treating him like a lackey. Stevens hinted that not only did he, Stevens, feel the brothers had something to do with the murders, but that the police suspected them too, and had told him. That could of course just be a case of sour grapes, but Zoeller decided to push Erik and see what he could squeeze out. Erik remained relatively defiant, asking why they suspected him and his brother, and Zoeller remarked that they appeared to be avoiding him, not returning his calls, and when certain questions were put to them, the answers could at best be described as evasive, certainly not helpful. In short, they didn't seem to want to offer any assistance to the police, as if they didn't want the killers of their parents caught.

It now emerged that the close bond between the two brothers was under considerable strain as Lyle, the elder now acting as the father, spent money like water and also seemed to be dipping into his brother's share. Erik was beginning to fight back, realising he was being treated badly. Seeing his chance, Zoeller asked Erik outright if his brother had been involved, if he had hired someone to kill their parents. Erik remained loyal to his sibling, but once Zoeller had left the younger brother began frantically ringing Princeton, looking for Lyle. He got, worse luck, Glenn Stevens, and stammered that the police suspected them and he had to talk to Lyle. He was no good on his own, he had to have his brother to talk to.

Soble and his partner decided before they could write a story naming the boys as suspects they had to know from the police if they were on the right track, so they asked for a meeting. At that meeting, each side felt the other out but each left with about as much, or as little, as they had come in with. The only real result was that both sides now believed their suspicions to be at least not groundless. Soble requested, and got, a follow-up interview from the brothers, but this time found them more close-mouthed, more guarded, as if they knew they were on the suspect list and were determined not to do anything to move themselves to the top of it.

There was one addition: this time, the boys had brought their lawyer.

After Soble had quizzed him on his reckless spending, and the fact that he planned to go back to school in the winter, Lyle remarking that by January the murders would be a long time in the past, the answers began to dry up. No comment, my lawyer advises and so on, made the interview seem more like a police one after they had been cautioned. Something had clearly changed. Something was up. And very quickly the reporters were shown the door, but not before Soble had gone for broke and asked Erik if he thought Lyle had done it. "No", said Erik, but did not elaborate as the door was closed in the reporters' faces.

But what's the old saying? As one door closes another opens? When Zoeller and his partner went to see Craig Cignarelli, Erik's best friend had a tale to tell, a tale that potentially could blow the case wide open. He told of how he and Erik had been having dinner when the younger Menendez began to describe how he and his brother had shot their parents. There was a lot of critical detail in the account Erik Menendez gave, and inwardly Zoeller was salivating, this amounting to a confession, until Erik said (according to Cignarelli) "It might have happened." That took their enthusiasm down several notches. Still, the question remained: why even broach the subject? Why risk putting he and his brother in the frame, even if only hypothetically? And how did they have such gruesome details about the deaths?

The Deputy DA, Pam Ferrero, listened to their retelling of their conversation with Cignarelli, and decided it was good, but they needed more before they could go for an arrest. She suggested Zoeller and Linehan ask the kid to wear a wire. They were surprised and gratified that he agreed to do so. All they needed now was for him to get Erik talking again and make the same confession, even if as a hypothetical, and they would have him. Unfortunately Erik got spooked - he surely didn't suspect his friend of wearing a listening device, but he might have considered it a bad idea to repeat the "confession", in case anyone took it for the truth - and laughed the whole thing off. Still, the conversation between the two young men did prove at least that Cignarelli had been telling the truth when he had said Erik had made the confession.

Then there was Greg Guest, a friend of his brother's who, when borrowing Lyle's Porsche (recently purchased with his inheritance, a snip at sixty four thousand dollars) found a spent shell casing in Lyle's leather jacket. Having mailed the shell to the cops, he then tried to back away from it, changing his story as to where it had been found, but as it happened a ballistics expert assured Zoeller it had not come from the murder weapon. On this, he would later be proven wrong.

All this time, the Menendez will was slowly but indefatigably making its way through probate court. The cops knew that once it was approved and the boys could get their hands on the real money, they would likely skip the country and be out of the jurisdiction of law enforcement. Time was not on the side of the police, and was running out. They needed to find those shotguns, which would then tie their owners to the weapons and provide irrefutable proof as to the identity of the killers of Jose and Kitty Menendez.

The search would not be an easy one. Within a ten-mile radius of Los Angeles there were over three hundred gun shops (at least, registered ones) and most likely the brothers had been careful enough not to buy close to home, so ten miles might not be a large enough area to cover. But LA is roughly 500 square miles in area, so work that one out! Zoeller and his team would have had to expand, if the ratio held true, their search to about fifteen thousand shops! And this assuming the boys had not gone further afield, and bought the guns out of state! It seemed a hopeless task, certainly one that would not be completed before the looming deadline of the probate.

And then, finally, out of the blue, they got a break.

Judalon Rose Smyth came to the BHPD with a complaint, and when her contact heard what was in that complaint he knew Zoeller would want to be told, so he brought her to meet him. Turned out Smyth was a friend of Dr. Jerome Oziel, Erik's psychiatrist, and she told an extraordinary story about his asking her to eavesdrop on the conversation he had had with Lyle and Erik, where Erik had told him about the murder. Lyle, apparently, lost it and shouted "Now we have to kill him, and everyone associated with him!" while Erik sobbed and declared he couldn't kill anymore. Oziel was so scared he armed himself and told his wife to go into hiding with his children. She said he had the whole thing on tape - confessions, descriptions of how the two brothers had killed their parents, Lyle's crowing about having got away with it, everything.

Accordingly a search warrant was issued for Oziel's house, office and the safety deposit box he was known to keep. He was reluctant to hand over the tapes - scared, more like - but had no choice in the end. Before sealing the tapes for the court, Zoeller and his team listened and they knew they finally had the evidence they needed. It was time to move on the brothers.

[Trollheart]

IV. The Truth, the Whole Truth, and Anything But the Truth: Brothers in the Dock

"If the police get their hands on those tapes, I'm fucked." - Lyle Menendez

I: All My Dreams, Torn Asunder...

The Arrest

While Erik played in a tennis tournament in Israel, Lyle was taken as he and his friends drove in his yellow jeep to get some food. Zoeller knew the elder Menendez was only back in Beverly Hills for a short while, as he was now running a restaurant he had bought in Princeton, and this was their chance to catch him. They decided against surrounding the mansion since their grandmother, Jose's mother Maria was staying there, and the people of Beverly Hills were a little averse to armed standoffs in their backyards. Seeing the blockade, Lyle furiously slammed the jeep into reverse - right into a cop van blocking his exit. Armed police jumped out and shouted at the three men in the jeep to get out and lie down, which they did.

After a short while the two friends, one of which was Glenn Stevens, the guy who had agreed to try to entrap Erik, were released and sent back to the mansion to break the news to Maria that the police had arrested the killer of her son and daughter-in-law, and that it was their son, while Lyle was booked and then sent to the LA County Men's Jail. The police held a media announcement, the motive given for the crime simple greed. They also said they would be pushing for the death penalty. The family, of course, did not believe it and were determined to stand by Lyle. Erik, when he heard of the arrest of his brother, rushed home and turned himself in. He was nothing without his elder brother. He was quickly reunited with him in an LA cell.

Now that they had their main suspects, the police had to shore up their case. The tapes all but proved the brothers' guilt, but given that they had been seized from a psychiatrist's office, even though all the proper forms had been observed and everything had been done by the book, there was a good chance they would be ruled inadmissible as evidence, which made finding the weapons such a priority again. Luckily, again Smyth came up trumps, advising them not only of the dumping site for the guns (which though searched for were never found) but that the boys had bought them not in LA but in San Diego. Frustrated at all the time and man-hours wasted, Zoeller nevertheless started from zero again, painstakingly visiting every gun shop along the San Diego Freeway, getting the same answer in every shop until in desperation he tried the Big 5 discount store, where to his amazement and delight he found a receipt for two Mossberg shotguns, bought August 18 1989 - a mere two days before the killings - and paid for by one Donovan Jay Goodreau.

Interviewed by Zoeller, Goodreau realised his stolen driving licence had been used by the brothers to buy the guns, but confirmed the signature was not his. The DA ordered samples of the two Menendez's handwriting to be collected, for comparison. Erik refused to give a sample. But now the carelessness of the two brothers began to come back to haunt them. Although the clerk at Big 5 could not identify the buyer of the gun from the mugshots he was shown, nor were the police able to lift any fingerprints from the form, one of the other clerks remembered that one of them had called back days later to ask about the video surveillance. Turned out there was no surveillance - the cameras had no film in them. But the call itself had to be treated as a suspicious act. Why would anyone want such information?

The Trial

Of course, as might be expected, Menendez money bought the best defence team possible. Heading it was Leslie Abrahamson, a tiny woman with a mouth and manner that varied completely inversely with her stature. She was a feared figure, a tenacious and vicious fighter for her clients, and vigorously opposed the death penalty. She was also someone who would stoop to any depths to win her case, and who didn't care all that much if her client was guilty, as long as she could get them off. She would defend Erik, while the quieter and less experienced, though no less determined Jill Lansing would be at Lyle's table. Facing both would be the returning Pam Ferrero, now married and a Bozanich, who had been asked back onto the case when the DA lost faith in the man meant to take first chair, Irving Alhadeff. It was almost a case of things coming full circle for Ferrero, now Bozanich, as she had been the one trying to build the case against the brothers, but had had to go back to another case she had been working on and leave this one in the hands of Alhadeff.

The prosecution held its breath for several days while closed hearings went on to determine whether or not the tapes seized at Oziel's office could be used as evidence. In a major coup, the judge ruled that they could. The defence immediately appealed the decision, but it was upheld; the appeal delayed the trial for almost a year. Giving his ruling in open court, the judge quoted from transcripts from the tapes, proving in the boys' own words their guilt. The family, no surprise, was shocked, and much of the brothers' support dissolved, though, it must be said, not all. Abramson, unbowed, stated her intent to appeal to the highest court in the land. This added another year onto the start of the trial, and in June 1992 the Supreme Court issued its ruling.

It did not go well for the prosecution.

One tape would be allowed into evidence, but not the one Zoeller and Bozanich wanted, and none of the tapes could be played in court. Abramson crowed over her victory, though the brothers didn't seem to see it as such. And now the agency of the case's biggest break, and that which enabled it to come to court, was about to throw a serious spanner in the works. Judalon Smyth took out indictments against Oziel, claiming he all but hypnotised her, raped her, plied her with drugs, and put her life in danger by having her listen outside his office door when Lyle was in there being told what his brother had said. Her accusations were sure to be picked up upon by Abramson and her defence team, and used to discredit the psychiatrist as an unreliable witness.

In response, Oziel and his wife, who stood by him, fought back and called Smyth delusional, vindictive and a liar. They detailed how they had opened their home to her after she had become fearful for her life, and how she had threatened and abused them while there. Oziel himself denied he had asked her to listen at the door, pointing out that it being a psychiatrist's office and security and privacy being of paramount importance, it was all but impossible for any intelligible sound to be heard through the door. He painted Smyth as someone scorned and out for revenge, and turned her accusation of violence and ill-use of her back upon him, saying he was the one who was frightened of her.

Meanwhile, in jail, Lyle was not popular. A man who was used to getting everything he wanted and answering to nobody, with little feeling or sympathy or even time for others, he did not take to the life of a prisoner well, and had many complaints lodged against him. Erik seemed to be sliding towards or revealing a homosexual side, and when a priest began attending him, the younger brother began to spill details of abuse he allegedly suffered at the hands of both his parents. These accusations - which the dead man and woman could not refute - would form much of the basis of their defence case, as Abramson went, as she was known to do, for the "abused-child-kills-abusing-parent-let-him-off" angle which had served her so well in the past.

But now that the idea of the gang hit had been put to bed completely, it emerged that the brothers really hadn't thought it through. A kneecapping is a popular form of punishment, yes: they had it here in Ireland (at least, up the north) during the Troubles. But it's meant as a warning. They smash your kneecaps, you're on crutches or in a wheelchair for a while, you get better, you do what you're told otherwise next time it will be worse. Or maybe you don't recover, and spend the rest of your life in that wheelchair, wishing you had listened when you were warned. And you serve as a warning to others. So there would be no point in kneecapping someone while at the same time killing them in such a brutal fashion. Why bother? A warning shot into the brain? Made no sense.

Also, it's a well known fact that in general, mobs don't kill families. Here, yes, the gangs are led by no code of honour of any sort, and even a blameless taxi driver who has the bad fortune to be related to a mob boss can get shot, but in America, particularly among the cosa nostra, who revere mothers and wives as angels, there is an understood ban on hurting the women. Yet the Menendezes gave their mother the most grisly and protracted death of their two parents. Mob hits also, generally, are more in the surgical line, as in, not so bloody and violent. Bugsy Siegal was an exception, though nobody has ever confirmed for sure that his was a mob hit. But even the St. Valentine's Massacre in the 1930s only involved the guys being machinegunned down. Messy, sure, violent certainly, but not overkill. And that was Capone.

No, the attempt to make the murder of their parents look like a mob hit was overdone, based on an inexact knowledge of gang behaviour and zero experience with mobsters and their modus operandi. The killing had all the hallmarks of having been made to look like that, but not being that. Had a more experienced police force than the BHPD been investigating, it's likely they would have quickly dismissed such a theory as absurd.

Back in jail, plans were found in Lyle's cell which seemed to show the layout of a building, but did not conform to the specifications of the jail, so though the brothers had been accused of trying to hack through their chains and leg it, the plans didn't look like ones for escape from the jail. What they were, the prison officers did not know. Letters accompanied the plans, which spoke of going to South America, then to the Middle East. Presumably this was to avoid extradition back to America; his letter then went on to counsel Erik not to testify against him, to have faith, to remain loyal. Very oddly, he mentioned that he was determined that their parents should not have died in vain. Considering he and his brother killed them, this is a statement that's very hard to reconcile, unless you assume he was compartmentalising, and was refusing to realise that it was his fault.

Next he talked about family secrets, but did not allude to what they were. He was concerned though that these would come out in court, and worried what bearing they might have on the case. Then he as much as admitted his guilt, saying "what we did in August was a mistake."

As for Jose, a line comes to mind from Shakespeare's Henry IV, Part I:
"Ill-weaved ambition, how much art thou shrunk!
When that this body did contain a spirit,
A kingdom for it was too small a bound,
But now two paces of the vilest earth is room enough."

After all his grandiose plans - buying an island for his family, running for the Florida senate, seeing his sons grow up to be famous tennis stars, and no doubt leaving behind some massive monument to his greatness, with his two sons now in jail and awaiting trial on the murder of he and his wife, all that was left for the world to remember Jose Menendez was a plastic tombstone and some dead flowers. History would not remember this Cuban immigrant who had wrestled the American Dream and made it do his bidding, forcing life to shape itself into the destiny he wanted, the destiny he demanded. No. People would only remember that this was a man who pushed his children to achieve greatness, and that they turned on him and took his life, the ultimate, the final, the worst betrayal.

Shakespeare again comes to mind: "Let her see," snarls an angry King Lear "how Sharper than a serpent's tooth it is to have a thankless child!"

Let's just pause here before we go any further, and examine the evidence. It may at this case be all circumstantial, but it's pretty compelling all the same. A number of questions arise.

*How did the killers gain such easy access to the Mendendezes's home?

*Why did the family dog, fiercely protective of Kitty, not attack or even make any sound?

*How did the killers know that their targets were likely to be asleep in front of the television?

*Why were there wounds on both Kitty and Jose's knees? Though in Kitty's case, her body had been blasted so many times and in so many places this probably becomes a moot question, but what about Jose? He was shot sitting down, his head blown away. How would anyone be able to kneecap a man in a sitting position without having him move, and if the shots were fired after those that took off his skull, why would anyone bother doing that? What would be the point?

*Why did Lyle and Erik seem so desperate to get back into the house the morning after the crime?

*How could two boys whose parents had just been killed even think of playing tennis?

*Why would those same two boys - or one of them at least - express indifference to catching the killers?

*Why would the other one mention that it was possible - or, in his words, "it could have happened" - that they had killed their own parents?

*Why did neither boy express any remorse at the death of their parents soon after, especially since they had made such a show of unrestrained grief when the police showed up after the killing?

*If he was innocent, why did Lyle try to escape from the blockade when he was arrested?

*Why did the boys not cooperate with the investigation: failing to return calls, not being available for interviews, keeping quiet about things?

*Why had Lyle plans of some sort of building in jail, and a letter that seemed to detail a life after prison?

*Why did they both say the room was filled with smoke when they discovered their parents' bodies, when the smoke would easily have cleared by that time?

*Why did they take so long - nearly an hour after finding the bodies - to call the police?

*And probably the biggest question of all: why would they have confessed to, even boasted about killing their parents to their psychiatrist, and why then would Lyle threaten him and indicate his life was in danger?

[Trollheart]

II: Men II Boyz: "Aunt" Leslie Shapes the Narrative

Having made the claim that the boys had only killed their parents in order to preserve their own lives, which they were in fear for, and that they had been striking back at years of abuse and torture against them, perpetrated by the corpses now underground, Leslie Abramson went to work supporting her accusation. LA was already reeling from the verdicts in the Rodney King case, and tensions were still high as people watched the Menendez trail with bated breath. Where the King trial had been both a case of law enforcement v the ordinary man, and a litmus test as to how far those officers of the law were entitled to go in the so-called execution of their duty (or how much the courts would turn a blind eye when they went beyond the norm) as well as a case of essentially black man versus white man, this trial was very much asking an important question. Could those with money and power secure freedom from the law? Was their position and prestige enough to insulate them from the consequences of their actions?

While it would be unfair to say that Abramson was trying to prove it was - she really didn't care if they were guilty, as long as she got paid and they got off, another success in her career - the Assistant DA and her team were endeavouring to do their best to show that American justice, the rule of law applied to everyone, regardless of status, wealth or colour. This of course would prove to be far from the case in respect of two huge media figures, Michael Jackson avoiding a sentence for child assault the next year, followed quickly by the similar acquittal of O.J. Simpson, and a third time for Jackson in 2005. Both men, ironically, were black, so it was hard for African-Americans to protest about the injustice of these non-convictions. Had one or both been white, it's possible it would have been a completely different story. However, with two white boys on trial race would be unlikely to figure in this, and Bozanich believed her team had a good case, and that the juries (two, as some of the charges pertained only to Erik and some only to Lyle, while in some they were both seen as complicit) would see through the tissue of lies and fantasy that the terrier leading the defence was about to place before them.

The rest of the Menendez family were in something of a quandary. If the evidence presented by Abramson convinced the jury that Erik and Lyle had killed in self-defence, then they might be acquitted, but in order for that to happen, all the family's dirty laundry - real or imagined - was going to have to get a good and very embarrassing public airing. Obviously, they did not want their secrets - if there were any - to be exposed, but then they probably didn't want Jose's sons being sent to the gas chamber either, so what to do? Not as if they had a choice of course: the show was about to begin, and Abramson intended it to be the Greatest Show on Earth, or as she quipped herself, "Let the sleaze fly!"

As with most juries, there were those who were instantly dismissed by either side, like the person who wrote that life was a two-edged sword and sometimes good people had to do bad things. Both juries were weighted more in the male arena, which some people believed might lessen the chances of its being sympathetic towards a charge of the boys having suffered child abuse, this being usually more the purvue of women, and the average age was also questioned, with most jurors over the forty years mark. This was believed to likely lead to a more "old school" view, where parents were supposed to be obeyed and kids did not have the right to hit back, certainly not so brutally. Out of a pool of a thousand jurors, the two sets of twelve were picked, and to their dismay were told their services were expected to be required for about five months.

This was going to be a long and hard trial.

California, surely one of the most liberal states in America, while retaining the death penalty at this time, still only reserved it for "special cases" of murder. To their eternal worry, Erik and Lyle fit this category, as they had lain in wait for their victims (planned the murder and not carried it out as a spur of the moment thing) and they had acted together. If found guilty they could most certainly be executed. Financial gain was also allowed by the judge as a motive, even though a county judge had thrown this out two months previously, why I don't know as it's obvious to anyone with a brain that the boys not only profited from the two murders, but made no secret of it, going around spending money like movie stars.

The judge, Stanley M. Weisberg, was already well known, infamous even, for having moved the trial of the cops accused in the King case to a more white-friendly locale, angering African-Americans and the defence, who claimed Mr. King would not get justice from that neighbourhood. As the jury had only one black man on it, they were proven to be right, as all four officers were acquitted, resulting in the LA riots of 1992. Although the officers were eventually found guilty (well, two of them) the next year - seemingly by another reluctant judge, who must have realised he couldn't possibly acquit again - they received very minor sentences, and Weisberg's name was irrevocably and inextricably linked with the original trial and its aftermath. He probably felt he had a reputation to repair and a point to prove, and though he would not really be able to decide the boys' guilt, he would have been keenly aware that his performance in the trial would be under public scrutiny, and he could not afford to be seen to fuck up.

From day one the trial was set to become a movie, as a screenwriter called Matt Tabak was first in line for a seat, claiming to be doing research. Like many public trials in the USA, in a way that really does not happen here or, I think, really that much in the UK or anywhere else, the court was crowded with those who wanted to watch, and one is certainly reminded of the bloodthirsty spectators who filled the Colosseum in Rome to watch gladioli, sorry gladiators fight to the death for their amusement, and more recently the popularity, up to and including the nineteenth century, of public hangings. While undoubtedly there were those there who supported the boys, others who wanted to see them get what was coming to them, and those who were genuinely interested in how the trial would play out, there's no question that there was a large percentage of people who simply went there to rubberneck and gawk. One woman even smiled that her husband had asked her to bring him there for his  birthday!

Abramson knew what she was doing, and how to play the role that would play most favourably with the jury. She assumed the status of a doting aunt, taking charge of how Erik dressed, making him look more like a Sunday school kid than a cold-blooded killer. She plucked threads off his sweater and leaned on his shoulder in a motherly way, and did everything she could to present the image of a blameless boy when she knew she was defending a ruthless murderer. Abramson was an opponent of the death penalty, but had no problem using it as an issue to bolster up her own reputation. An interesting development was that none of Kitty's family attended the trial. Jose's relations sat stone-faced, as if to deny the terrible accusations the little woman at the defence table was about to direct against their brother and son.

They would be spared that horror for the moment though, as the prosecution opened their case, and though Pam Bozanich was out to get their grandsons/nephews, she was not about to entertain any nonsense about parental abuse. She reminded the jury of the many and frequent lies Lyle had told, including that the Mafia had been behind the killing, and that he was in fear of his own life. She spoke of the money that had been spent by the boys after the murders: the Rolex watches, the cars, the business investments - all made with Jose's money. She recalled the attempts of Lyle to destroy the file he had come across on Kitty's computer, the one he believed contained Jose's will, and his fears that if the tapes made by their therapist were to find their way into the hands of the police it would seal their fate.

Perhaps showing what shaky ground they were on, or just out of pure arrogance, the defence team latched onto the words "little Jewish guy" used by Bozanich to describe the computer expert who had tried to delete the file with the will on it, and asked for a mistrial. The judge, who was also Jewish, saw through this for the transparent and opportunistic ploy it was, and denied the motion, to nobody's surprise. Jill Lansing, defending Lyle, then went on to describe the lavish lifestyle he and Erik had been born into, how their father was rich, they had wanted for nothing, and painting a picture of two boys who had no need to murder their parents for their money. Then things went darker, as she detailed the total control Jose exerted over his family. This certainly could not be denied: enough witnesses had seen the man's explosive temper, his sneering belief that he knew better than even professionals, the way he had made nothing but enemies in his jobs and the way he had pushed the children to excel, even at the expense of their health and their youth. None of this was in dispute.

But of course, that in itself was not enough. Plenty of kids have pushy parents, who often want to try to live their lives, the success that evaded them, vicariously through their offspring. While you can't say there's nothing wrong with that, it can be pushed to dangerous levels, and this was certainly the case with Jose Menendez. But even that would not be accepted as a valid excuse for murder.

But there was more.

WARNING! TRIGGER EVENTS - ABUSE, SEXUAL AND PSYCHOLOGICAL. GRAPHIC DESCRIPTIONS OF THE (ALLEGED) ABUSE OF CHILDREN. CLICK "SHOW" AT YOUR OWN RISK.


According to Lansing, a few days before the murders Erik had taken Lyle to one side and confessed to him that their parents had been abusing him for twelve years.. Lyle, who had also (the team claimed) been abused from an early age, immediately confronted his father and told him it was going to stop, or the two brothers were going to leave and never come back, taking Jose's dreams of his sons becoming famous tennis stars out of his grasp forever. Jose, in typical fashion, they alleged, sneered and told his son he could do whatever the hell he wanted (this would be easy to make the jury believe, as this was certainly the man's philosophy, as had been proven throughout his life in America) and threatened the boy's life. It was then, said Lansing, that the two began to plot the murder, believing they had been left no other choice. It was literally now kill or be killed.

Lansing skillfully dismantled the prosecution's arguments, both about the murder and the spending spree, having justified the one and used the other as evidence that the boys were not trying to cover up their crime. She painted a story of a violent, abusive man (hard to deny, but where to draw the line? Lansing seemed to have an endless supply of paper) who would punch his kids when they upset him, force them to shower with him and indoctrinate them until they only thought what he wanted them to think. Brainwashing and control to the highest degree. The idea was that Lyle was to be his heir, his successor, and would be Jose v2.0, making none of the mistakes and suffering none of the indignities that his father had. She showed how cruel and sadistic Jose Menendez was, delighting in ending careers and browbeating employees, happy to have everyone terrified of him, a man who ruled with a fist of iron, in the workplace and a home.

And then came the sexual practices.

"SEXUAL GRAPHIC CONTENT: READ AT YOUR OWN RISK!"

It was alleged that Kitty still bathed the boys, and that from an early age Jose had abused first Lyle, then Erik, likening the abuse to a rite of passage, a way of toughening the boys up, and claiming the Romans had done it. Well, when in Rome... Sorry. Jose was accused of grooming the boys, of forcing them to perform oral sex and performing sodomy on them, and of inserting (ouch) pins into their penises. I warned you: don't say you weren't warned! Now that image is with you forever. It only gets worse.

Abramson said that when Erik cried the first time he had to give his father a blow job, Jose slapped him repeatedly. Tacks and needles, wooden implements, knotted rope, all were apparently used by the controlling father on his sons. Kitty didn't escape Abramson's character assassination either (which, if it was not true, was the very least this account amounted to): she was said to have regularly examined the boys' genitals up to the age of fifteen, and even when Erik thought he could escape the abuse by going to UCLA, Jose decreed that he would have to come back and sleep in the house several days a week so that his school work could be checked. He took this, she said, as a signal that even in college he would not be able to avoid the sexual attentions of his father.

[close]

For the prosecution, Lester Kuriyama refocused the attention of the jury, which had been forcibly diverted with these lurid tales of sexual abuse and control, back to the details of the murder. He reminded them that Oziel's tapes contained a confession wherein Lyle admitted killing his father because he was too controlling, not because he had been abused. He was also upset, he said on those tapes (of which only one had been allowed into evidence, if you remember) that he had been cut of of the will, which certainly proved a financial gain motive. Kuriyama scored something of an own goal though when he began talking about "Friends", the screenplay Erik and his friend had written: Abramson screamed "Objection!" on the grounds that the decision had not yet been made by Weisberg as to whether or not mention of the play would be allowed, the judge sustained the objection and the prosecutor had to retract the statement. Score one for the defence.

Witnesses, however, seemed to back up the prosecution's case. The 911 call had been proven to be a fabrication, and it was important the jury heard the tape, in order to understand what good actors the boys were, how they could callously kill their parents - or hysterically, if, as they and their defence team claimed, they were in fear of their lives - and then put on such a show, knowing it to be bollocks. The first officer on the scene, with the hilarious name of Michael Butkis (I kid you not!) noted that though the boys screamed and pounded the grass outside, he did not see any tears in their eyes. Apart from being upset, as you would expect, you might think that there would be some from the smoke after the guns had been discharged, but then, remember the two left it almost an hour after carrying out the slayings before ringing it in, and it would have taken several minutes at least for a car to reach the house, so the smoke was, as has already been noted, long dissipated.

The pilot of the boat which took the family on a shark-fishing trip, during which the contention of the brothers was that they feared this was a cover for their murder, did admit that the boys seemed distant and withdrawn, even scared, though in all likelihood this was again just acting, setting up their excuse for murdering their parents a day later. It's been noted by Ron Soble and  John Johnson, the authors of the book from which most of this is researched, Blood Brothers: The Shocking Inside Story of the Menendez Murders, that it would seem pretty stupid of Jose to try to kill his sons on a boat where there were witnesses, though one assumes it could have been made to look like an accident. Even so, the Menendez patriarch was not the type to leave anything to chance, or to risk failure, so this would hardly seem the ideal set-up. Why not just kill them at the house, where  it was all nice and private?

The relationship between attorney and judge is not always an easy one, especially when one is defending accused murderers, and parent murderers at that, and Abramson and Weisberg frequently butted heads over her sarcastic remarks, often deliberately made loud enough for everyone to hear, her dismissive gestures, her over-protection of Erik, and various other things about her the judge did not like. She fought, but ultimately the judge is the boss in any trial, and even lawyers can be held in contempt, or even removed at the behest of His or Her Honour, so the tenacious little terrier had to know when to draw her claws in, to mix metaphors slightly. The fact that the entire trial was being broadcast to the nation by Court TV probably factored into her performance, as a sympathetic television audience is always an asset, but Judge Weisberg was not having it. He reprimanded the TV news journalists for hassling attorneys and threatened to throw them out of the courtroom if they could not behave. He was making the most of his role, and determined to show his career still had some life in it, could possibly even be turned around.

The issue of the smoke came back to haunt the brothers as the police officers took the stand, one of them noting that the two had said that on arriving they smelled smoke, but that in his experience the smoke from a shotgun blast wafts away quickly after the gun has been used, and besides, one of the windows had been shot out, making it likely that the smoke had exited even faster than would have been normal. It seemed the boys were saying what they thought they should say. To be fair, had they done this properly they should have rented some old cabin or shack and tried out the guns, to see how quickly the smoke hung around for, but that didn't figure into their plan it seemed.

Another victory for the defence team came when, prior to Craig Cignarelli, Erik's long-time friend and co-author of the play "Friends", giving evidence against his buddy, Judge Weisberg, after reading through the play, decided it would not be admitted into evidence. He believed it had no bearing on the case and would only confuse jurors. Bozanich was crushed, Abramson crowed in triumph. But she was not out of the woods yet. Cignarelli was testifying against Erik, and he could do a lot of damage if he said the wrong things, or if people saw him in what she considered would be the wrong way. It's one thing to ban a piece of evidence, but you can't ban a witness if they want to take the stand. And Cignarelli did. No doubt he saw some chance for notoriety here for himself, and was probably working out which of the rags he would sell his exclusive inside story to, and who would play him in the upcoming movie.

[Trollheart]

Intermission: Scripting in Crayon

I'd just like, again, to pause here and consider the so-called script that Erik and Cignarelli wrote. I haven't read it (must see if it's available online) but from what I understand it's a very bland, boring, cliched and predictable story. Guy finds out he's due a huge inheritance and kills his parents. Nothing much happens. He gets caught and dies with a smile on his face. Meh. Why did the two of them think Hollywood would be falling over themselves to produce that rubbish? Why would anyone be interested? Why would anyone watch such unimaginative trash? I suppose it goes back to the super-ego of any Menendez, all of whom believed implicitly in the superiority of their family and who could not conceive that anything that came out of them could not be gold. Erik probably thought they (more he; I would imagine he thought he was the creative brains behind a script I could have crapped out) had written The Great Gatsby or something, and expected a bidding war.

That's him, and that would not be a surprising way for a Menendez to view his own work. It was his, so therefore must be of tremendous value. It could not possibly be bad. But what about Craig Cignarelli? Unless he was as much a narcissist as his friend, he must have known that the script was garbage. He can't seriously have thought that they screenplay they put together was anything better than something any Hollywood hack or even student in his bedsit could bang out, and equally worthless? Was he relying on the contacts Erik had through his father, to get them a deal? Did he think the Menendez name would be enough to get them signed up, despite the peurile nature of the story? Or was he just carried away on perhaps the wave of Erik's enthusiasm and conviction that they were going to hit it big?

In the end, the pathetic script of "Friends" was destined not even to play a small part in the trial of its co-author for murder, as it was excluded by the judge, so it's hardly even a footnote in the history of the Menendez murders. It was of course praised by Kitty, but then, Erik could have wiped his arse with a piece of typing paper and presented it to his mother as a script and she most likely would have gushed about how great it was. Till he shot her dead, of course. I wonder what Jose would have made of it? Would he have seen in the amateurish scrawl the warning, a foreboding of his own grisly death? Or would he just have dismissed it, as he did almost everything his younger son did, contempt in his eyes?

Back to the trial anyway.



Cignarelli proved a difficult witness for Abramson, so used to being in control, to keep in check. To some extent she must have felt like a cowboy trying to keep a wild stallion from bucking and bolting, using all her skill to calm him down. But Cignarelli did not want to calm down. He also did not intend to be told what he could and could not say, and when he brought up a reference to the Billionaire Boys Club murder, almost ten years prior, she did not want her boys linked with that scandal and asked for his testimony to be stricken from the record, which Judge Weisberg agreed with. He told the jury to disregard Cignarelli's comments.

Now this has always confused me. How can you ignore or disregard something you've heard but have been told not factor into your decision when deliberating in the jury room? Of course, you're not supposed to let it influence you, but if you hear a defendant say, for instance, that he hated dogs and the case was an animal cruelty case (for example) how hard would it be not to let that play on your mind and even subconsciously take it into account when discussing the case with your fellow jurors? I mean, it's not like people have delete buttons where you can literally forget what you've been told just because a judge says so. I believe I would find it hard to disregard any testimony I was told to, once I had heard it, and I also believe that this jury kept that in mind, despite the judge's instructions to the contrary.

Cignarelli was able to drop a bombshell - well, it would have been one if the brothers had denied the killings, which they had initially but had now admitted to, placing all their emphasis on why they had done it. He said about two weeks after the murders Erik had told him how it had been done, and then made some cryptic remark about all great leaders having no parents, or some nonsense that he had to quickly backtrack on and try to explain. There was no mention of any abuse, which might seem strange, as these two were the closest friends could be really, and you would imagine they would have shared everything. If Erik could talk to anyone, other than his older brother, surely it would have been Craig Cignarelli?

But then, another friend of the brothers was about to blow a serious hole in the prosecution's case.

[Trollheart]

III: The Little Jewish Guy Who Was Never There: The Prosecution Rests

Donovan Goodreau testified that he had told Lyle that he had been molested by one of his father's friends, but when Lansing pushed him to reveal whether or not Lyle had reciprocated and told him about the abuse he had suffered, he shook his head no. This took Lansing by surprise, as she had listened to part of a taped interview a writer had had with Goodreau for a book he was writing on the murders, in which Goodreau said that Lyle had confided in him. Lansing played him the tape, which confirmed what she had been told, and Goodreau shrugged and said he didn't recall saying that. Kind of odd, when presented with clear evidence that he had said it, to not try to justify it or excuse it or claim it had been taken out of context, said in anger, coaxed out of him or anything like that, but to deny it?

But Bozanich had an idea. While Goodreau was being accused - in the court of public opinion only, not officially, though often the former is the more important - of perjury and therefore painted as an unreliable witness, the prosecutor pointed out that the likelihood was that the boy had been fed the information, which at the time was mere speculation and quite probably outright lies, and had simply related it in that manner. But just saying that would not be enough: Bozanich needed to get Donovan Goodreau on the stand and question him herself, which she did the next day. Whether he grabbed the lifeline she offered him, or whether he realised he was being used, he agreed that it did seem likely he had picked up the story about the boys taking baths with their father from the writer himself, and the issue was quietly fudged out, though the judge did not this time instruct the testimony to be removed from the record. Jurors would have to make up their own minds as to who was telling the truth.

Lyle's behaviour after the killings became a focus again, as it would frequently, speaking as it did to his state of mind in the wake of the death of his parents. His spending sprees were catalogued by his bodyguard, including the possibility of getting a bullet-proof limo, and perhaps most damning of all (though the jury were not allowed to hear this) was his contention that on the evening his parents went to the funeral home, Lyle had gotten it on with one of his female relatives. Hardly shows a man in the throes of remorse and sorrow now does it? Lansing attempts to dirty Glenn Stevens' role as Lyle's friend due to his wearing a wire and reporting to the police earned her a sharp "Friendship transcends a lot of things, but homicide is not one of them." Guess there's no real answer to that one. In fact, Lansing had taken a chance there and put herself in the firing line, risking being seen as someone who was of the opinion that friends covered up for each other, no matter what the crime, including murder. That was a dangerous card to play, and she did her best to walk it back.

This entailed turning the spotlight back on Glenn Stevens, and what a bad person he was. She questioned his personal code of honour, made a lot out of nothing - some "embellishments" on his resume: I thought Muddy Waters wrote that song? But Stevens was in danger of handing her if not a smoking gun then at least a ticking time bomb. During the recess he spoke to Bozanich and admitted he had taken money from the register in the restaurant he had been managing for Lyle. It wasn't a lot - a few hundred dollars - but in issues like this it's often less the amount stolen and more the fact that the person could do such a thing. If he had stolen hundreds, could he not be expected to steal thousands? Lansing, should she learn of this, would love it and use it to its fullest extent to discredit Stevens as a witness, and more, as a man with an axe to grind against his old friend.

But Bozanich was and is an ethical person, and furthermore she knew the risk she would run, personally, if it came to light that she had hidden evidence from the defence. Not only would her own career suffer, but the trial might very well collapse. Stevens was only one witness anyway, and probably not a key one. Her duty was clear, and the defence licked their lips as she, probably through gritted teeth, revealed what Stevens had told her. As a result, Stevens was to lose his job on Wall Street. Not sure why: they're all crooks there. Oh, probably because he admitted it. Cardinal sin, that. Page one, Glenn! Page one!

But all of this was really more frosting on the dark cake of murder, and served only to distract from the main thrust of the trial, which was determining the guilt of the two brothers, or rather, whether their motivation was sufficient to save them from the death penalty. The trial had now dragged on for four years. Other, more sensational trials had taken its place, like the already mentioned O.J. Simpson murder case, and until the allegations of parental sexual abuse were brought up, nobody seemed to care any more. Fresh interest was injected into the trial, as it always is, by juicy details of lurid accusations or sexual deviancy on the part of Jose and Kitty, and suddenly the trial was again front and center in America.

At least, among all the curses and hard words and fights and accusations and snipes at each other's teams and witnesses, there existed a sense of a code of honour and mutual respect between the two attorneys. Abramson was seen to mouth "fuck off" at Bozanich while she took a sidebar (private consultation or instruction with or from the judge, up at his bench) while for her part, the prosecutor described her opponent as a "piece of shit lawyer." Ah, professional courtesy, huh? Nice to see too that Abramson's husband, who worked at the LA Times and was accused of feeding her information from its reporters, greeted the charge with a remark worthy of his wife: "Go fuck yourself."

The expert to whom Bozanich had referred offhandedly as a "little Jewish guy" was up next, and Brian Witkin admitted that it was strange for a client to call him not to retrieve precious lost data on a computer, but to destroy what was there. Lyle's comment, he testified, to not only delete the file but "make it look as if you were never here" was something that disturbed him and made him suspicious. "It made my spine crawl*," he admitted. People generally don't want data destroyed unless there's something on it that they don't want people to see, and often this tends to be incriminating evidence, whether in a legal sense or not. Lyle's Uncle Carlos had hired his own expert, who arrived the following day, and whether Witkin had not done the greatest job or whether he had deliberately left traces, this other expert could tell that someone had tampered with the file.

* This is a crossing of two metaphors. Your spine cannot crawl. Your skin can crawl, or you can get a shiver up or down your spine, but your spine is a long bone which can't move in that way. Whether he got confused or not I don't know, but this is not something people say. Just thought I'd point that out in my capacity as smartarse pedant.

The clashes between the judge and Abramson continued and intensified. He was constantly warning her about her behaviour, which included sarcastic shakes of the head, talking loudly at the defence table, and her inappropriately motherly attitude towards Erik, an obvious ploy to turn the grown man into a frightened boy for the jury's benefit. All she was really short of doing was getting him a teddy bear to hold during the trial. She was certainly ready to turn her own disadvantage over the notes taken by Ward into an advantage, as she prepared to discredit Dr. Oziel's tapes, intending to prove that they were at worst fabricated, at best a result of his coaching Lyle in what he said.

In this she had some unlooked-for but appreciated help, as Dr. Oziel was already under investigation by the California State Board of Psychology for engaging in "dubious practices", including having sex with his patients, and was in danger of losing his licence. This in itself helped paint him as less than an expert witness, to say nothing of his moral character, all of which would play into the defence's attempts to make his testimony worthless in the eyes of the only ones that mattered, the jury. But before she could begin her questioning, the usually arrogant and self-assured lawyer had to ask the judge what would constitute breakage of the therapist/patient privilege, because if she inadvertently strayed into this area with a careless question, a whole can of worms could be opened up, including a decision to exclude the other tapes from the trial becoming invalid due to her actions. Weisberg's contempt for her showed in his snippy reply:

"It's just like any other issue that's presented in a trial," he told her in exasperation. "Counsel don't normally expect the court to rule in advance and give you a preview of what it is your trial strategy should be."

Nevertheless, Weisberg's personal dislike for Abramson did not necessarily place him in the corner of the prosecuting team. He refused to allow Oziel to use the word "sociopath" to describe the boys, even though they had used it themselves in therapy. He demanded instead that the therapist explain it in layman's terms, and  Oziel described a sociopathic murder as being "being a murder that was predominantly a means to an end, something that the murderer believed was a way to achieve a particular end; and it was a planned, premeditated murder; and a way to deal with problem-solving; and that if there were emotions involved with it, they didn't get in the way of needing to accomplish the end; and that once there was a decision that the murder had to be committed, it was committed; and feelings, basically, didn't enter into it in a significant way."

Oziel described how Erik had visited him on, oddly enough, Halloween - October 31 1989 - and after a walk and talk with the therapist had admitted he and his brother had killed their parents. Well, this wasn't quite news at this point - had the prosecution been going for a confession, then this would have been potential dynamite, and it's likely Abramson would have tried to find some way to object to or have this comment struck from the record. As it was, Oziel went on to say that on returning to his office he listened to Erik lay out the whole plan, how and why it had come about, and how they intended to carry out the murders.

Oziel had then contacted Lyle, he said, and told him that Erik had spilled the beans. The older brother rushed over, full of fury both at the betrayal by his brother and also at the now-insoluble problem of what to do about the therapist. After the session, Oziel said Erik told him, Lyle's first words outside were "How do we kill Oziel?" Fearing, rather naturally, for his life, Oziel had had the tapes secured in a safe deposit box, with instructions that they be released to the police in the event of his death. An insurance policy, which Lyle must have raged at, thinking perhaps they should have done the therapist in that day before he had a chance to make plans for his own safety. But it was done, and there was nothing Lyle Menendez could do about it now.

Oziel went on to describe how the brothers had agreed 'We're sociopaths. We just get turned on by planning the murder. Once we plan it, nothing gets in the way. Once we start, nothing will stop us. Furthermore, we don't think much about what we're doing before we do it. Once we get going, we just go ahead and commit it and make it happen. And we can't change the plan because it's already formed perfectly.' It was patently obvious by now that Lyle was growing into and taking over the role his father had played with Erik, as he did what he could to control him, keep him under observation, counsel and guide him and make sure he didn't let anything else slip. Whether he realised this was happening or not I don't know, but Lyle and Erik had clearly become Jose and Lyle, the process repeating itself as the stronger bore down on the weaker one.

After Kuriyama was finished grilling the witness, it was Abramson's turn, but she found to her annoyance that he was able to give as good as he got. As a therapist he was used to people using words to suit their meaning, so was able to spar with the defence attorney and turn aside most if not all of her blows, leaving her looking foolish and a little desperate, and no doubt with even more hatred for the man than she had had before he had taken the stand.

As the prosecution prepared to rest its case, one detail still stuck out and annoyed them. Erik had said that Lyle had been watching a BBC movie some days before the murders, and it was from this that he had formulated his plan. But nothing in the BBC archives, on TV guide or any of the networks could pull up any similar sort of movie. Finally the mystery was solved almost by chance, as Kuriyama's wife spotted a video in the rental store about the Billionaire Boys Club, the movie concerned with the murder Abramson had tried so much to distance the trial from, and once they had watched it, it was evident that there were stunning similarities between the two cases.

• One of the BBC victims was shot in the back of the head. The victim was then shotgunned in an effort to obliterate his identity.

• Joe Hunt talked about the perfect murder. The BBC killers' alibi was that they had attended a movie the night of the slaying.

• The son of a multimillionaire Iranian who is slain in the BBC production proposes an alibi that his father had political enemies. Erik Menendez raised the issue of Castro engineering his Cuban-born father's death.

• In the BBC movie, Joe Hunt drove a Jeep and wore a Rolex watch. Erik, after the killings, bought a Jeep; and Lyle, four days following the slayings, bought three Rolex watches.

Excitedly, Kuriyama presented the movie to the judge, asking that it be seen. Weisberg, however, had had enough, believed the trial had dragged on long enough, and refused. On August 13 the prosecution rested.

The case for the defence ran into a major problem right away, when Weisberg opined - but did not rule - that abuse could not be used as an excuse for murder. He clearly saw that Abramson was grasping at straws, and while the judge could not throw that idea out as a defence, his contempt for it and his own personal dismissal of the idea must have had some effect on the jury, who presumably would have taken his experience and legal expertise into account when making their deliberations.

The other string to Abramson's bow was a thing called "imperfect self-defence", which holds that if a person kills out of fear for their life, even if that fear is not justified, then a manslaughter verdict can be brought in. In an attempt to prove this, Abramson had turned to a man whose black-and-white world said that whenever a child killed a parent (regardless of the age of the chld) it was invariably the parent's fault; they had abused the child. He made no allowance for, for instance, sociopathic or psychopathic children, those out for financial gain or revenge for perceived, but incorrect, mistreatment, or any of the myriad other reasons people can kill their parents. Just watch Killer Kids or Evil Twins or any of those programmes and you'll see that sexual, physical or psychological abuse is rarely behind these crimes.

But not in the world of Paul Nones. He accepted, without any proof at all, that the Menendez boys had been driven to murder, and it was he who advised Abramson on how to present the two men as boys to the jury and to the television audiences. It was his idea to dress them in sweaters rather than suits, refer to them as children and research their history back to when they were babies, to try to prove or infer some historical abuse. I suppose it never occurred to this man, in his years of practice defending killer kids, that he was in fact laying down the groundwork for others to murder their parents, knowing - or hoping, or expecting or intending - that they would be looked on in a sympathetic light, and perhaps even get away with it. I guess as long as he kept getting paid and was able to expound his crazy theories, it really didn't matter to him whether or not he set killers free, or attained more lenient sentences for them.

[Trollheart]

IV: Blah Blah, Black Sheep: The Inside Story?

"I knew from the first day they did it." - Marta Cano

If you want to find someone to testify against their family, look for the one who has been ostracised, the one who never fit in to the family ethic, who was looked down upon by the rest of the family. The one who was never invited to the Thanksgiving dinners and who had to make their own way in the world, without any help or support from their family. In other words, look for the black sheep of the family.

Marta Cano was that black sheep. Jose's older sister, she had been the first to leave home, a rebel even as a child, who refused to conform to the family's obsession with swimming and sports, and had been left to raise five children on her own without any alimony when her husband skipped out on her and sued for divorce. She claimed that she had always known the two boys had killed her brother and his wife, and told the defence that Jose had been brought up as a spoiled, nasty, bad-tempered child by their mother, a kid who got everything he demanded and took no responsibility for anything he did. She said that though she had no evidence of it, she was convinced Jose too had been abused, and more, that he had become mentally ill somewhere along the line.

This I have to admit personally I find unlikely. If Jose Menendez was mentally unsound, could he have run the businesses he did, turning them from loss-making failures into booming successes, and building for himself a corporate empire? Could he have orchestrated his sons' rise in the world of professional tennis, and not only survived but thrived in America as a poor immigrant who made good?

Mind you, I say she told the defence this, but she would not be allowed tell it to the jury, as Weisberg, tired of time-travelling, ruled that this was going back too far, and had no real relevance to the case. A crushing disappointment for Abramson, she was slightly mollified that he did allow Marta to give her impressions of the childhood of the two boys, a subject on which Jose's sister had much to say. She spoke of how the two boys had been cowed by her brother, forbidden to speak unless spoken to, were ridiculed and constantly taken aside by their father for "talks", in which, the defence would contend, he would indoctrinate the boys into his way of thinking, making it their way too, and sowing the seeds of his own destruction, and that of his wife.

While Erik, she said, was good to his mother, Kitty did not like Lyle, and was a bad mother. When Erik got lost on a shopping trip and it was announced over the tannoy that he had been found, Kitty noted that it was good that he had been found, and continued shopping, leaving him where he was. The reaction of the two boys to their aunt was completely different: Erik would run to Marta happily, while Lyle, from age two to four, would run away from her and hide. By age ten Erik had also begun avoiding her, and had developed a stutter, to his father's rage and dismay. Kitty once told her that she wished the boys had never been born, as they had ruined her marriage. She said this knowing that Lyle was listening. It didn't seem to bother her.

Kitty was portrayed further as a bad mother and a bad housekeeper by Marta, who said the house was a pigsty, with clothes, food and animal droppings everywhere, nothing tidied up, just a total mess. Bozanich, when it came her turn, questioned why, if all this were true, Marta would send her own son, Andy, to stay with the Menendezes. Marta had no answer. The defence case would drag on for three months and involve more than fifty witnesses as Abramson and her team tried to build a picture for the jury of - well, let's be brutally honest about it here - two people who deserved what they got, a father and a mother who treated their children shamefully, raped and abused them, and pushed them to a point where the only recourse these "kids" had was to end the lives of their tormentors.

The most potentially explosive of these mostly hum-drum, thank-you-you-may-step-down witnesses turned out to be a woman of thirty-four, who had visited the Menendez house over three summers, and to whom, she claimed, Lyle had confided about the abuse. She had no proof of course, and it could have been an elaborate story, but what did she have to gain from lying? At the time, she said, she had taken her concerns to Kitty, who had acted as she always did; she refused to believe it (or knew already) and dragged Lyle away, no doubt to face his angry father. Dianne Vander Molen then went on to say that the two boys had sexually assaulted her, though in a strange, almost cold way, as if she were something they were not sure about, or as if they were experimenting.

"No-one was there behind the eyes" - Norman Puls, Erik's maths tutor, 1987-1989

Many witnesses described how the two boys could just go blank, seem not to be there, such as the incident when Lyle had walked into the office of Alicia Hercz, the day school instructor at Princeton, sat down and said nothing for maybe forty minutes. Their tennis coach at the Calabasas Tennis Club, Douglas Doss, agreed. He said of Erik,  "He would just disappear mentally. He was gone." Norman Puls had a similar experience with Erik when he tutored him in mathematics between 1987 and 1989. "No-one was there behind the eyes," he remarked.

A picture was certainly being built up of two boys being controlled by their father and turning inwards as a result, of the possible warning signs of sociopathy and psychopathy that would one day turn them into heartless, remorseless, cowardly killers. Whether you could say the defence had managed to fulfill its brief in this regard or not, or indeed whether some of the testimony may have backfired on them, they had their ace in the hole ready to go, and it was something that everyone who was following the trial had been waiting for, the murder in his own words.

Lyle Menendez was about to take the stand.

"You're a bastard! I wish you had never been born!" - Kitty Menendez, in Lyle's testimony

Personally, I find it odd that Lyle began his testimony by trying to paint his family as an ordinary, or at least typical one. If the whole idea of their defence was that they were scared, terrified that their parents were going to kill them, that night they "preempted" Jose and Kitty by pumping round after round into them from their shotguns, would it not have made more sense to have built on the already pretty monstrous reputation of their father and use that as some sort of attempt at justification of murder? Seems to me that would be the way to go. But from the first, Lyle's idea - or the one he had been told to pursue - was to show how gentle his father could be, almost as gentle as Kitty. How they played together, loved each other and, though Jose pushed his son to achieve greatness, that he did so for the boy's own good. I mean, it's hardly painting a picture of a couple of monsters, now is it?

Of course, this was just the prologue, the soft approach until the big guns were brought out, and pretty soon Lyle was launching into detailed accounts of how his father sexually molested him. He testified that it began when he was about age seven and then changed from fondling and touching to full sex when he was seven, turning to oral sex which became anal sex, and then Jose began using other things to penetrate him, such as a toothbrush. Though he said his father had raped him, and went to his mother, Kitty (according to him) brushed it all aside and said he was exaggerating. Now while I don't for a moment believe these allegations, I will admit that from what I have read of her, this would be the kind of reaction I would expect from the mother of the Menendez boys. She was never a woman to face reality, and she was totally under Jose's spell - perhaps intimidated by him, but I don't think so - and so anyone badmouthing him in any way, especially such an abhorrent one, would get short shrift from her. She would be unlikely to believe even her own sons if they told her Jose was abusing them. So in a way here, Lyle was being very clever (or had been coached to be), by playing on what the jury already knew - or had been told and perhaps had taken as fact - about Kitty Menendez and shaping his narrative to fit that vision.

[Trollheart]

Intermission II: Abusing the Truth: The House of Cards Collapses

Let's take a moment and consider these charges. I mean, I assume they were made up, a desperate ploy to lessen the sentence or even gain acquittal for the brothers, but could they have been real? Jose was a man who liked control, that much is certain. And let's be honest about this, rape is one of the most absolute methods of control there is. You rape someone, you have complete power over them; you're dominating them, forcing them to accede to your will, thinking nothing of their own rights or desires or health even, virtually taking over their body with yours. So that's something you could certainly imagine the Menendez patriarch doing. However, there seems to be no other instance of his interfering with kids, and one thing that is generally known is that if a father abuses his own kids, he's likely to try it with others too.

But while rape is a horrible crime, and rape of children ten times more so, in the strictest terms you can say a man who rapes his daughters, though scum of the lowest order, is still technically heterosexual. A man who rapes his sons, has to be considered homosexual. In general, I don't think a man who exhibits homosexual tendencies confines them to his kids, and so we should surely expect to have seen evidence of Jose's being intimate with other men, probably in gay bars and places like that. No such evidence was presented, nor did the defence try to. Such evidence would have proven a pattern of homosexuality that would lend more weight to the brothers' accusations. Surely it would not have been for the want of trying, so there must have been nothing there to find.

As for Kitty? This I find even harder to believe. Statistically, the amount of women - mothers - who rape or even sexually interfere with their sons, or daughters, is so low as to be almost negligible. Women, and mothers in particular, are the nurturers, the carers, the protectors, and seldom if ever are accused in any sort of child abuse. The worst you can usually expect is that the mother knew and did nothing about it. Women are more tactile and emotional, but the brutality of rape is usually practiced against, not by them. How many men, honestly, do you know who have been raped by women? Sure, the usual problem that these crimes are not reported out of embarrassment exists, but overall I would still say the instances are seriously low. Women just don't do that sort of thing.

And while you could say that yeah, maybe (if the allegations about him were true) Jose forced or bullied her into joining in, I still don't see it. You really can't change someone's nature that radically, even with threats of violence (which were never mentioned) and if hurting your kids sexually is anathema to your gender, it would take either an incredibly strong-willed man (which sure,  Jose was, but there have to be limits) or a really weak-willed and submissive woman to allow that to happen. Weak in some ways Kitty may have been, but she and  Jose fought, so she wasn't a shrinking violet, and I could not see her deliberately assaulting her children, even on Jose's orders. I could see her ignoring it, convincing herself that Jose was, as always, right, and justifying it to herself, but not doing it herself.

But even so, I don't believe it happened. Jose liked to think of himself as a man's man, and I don't see that he had any homosexual tendencies. I guess he could have been bisexual, but nevertheless, I feel this would have manifested itself outside of his family, especially given that he was such a powerful man who held the careers of so many in his hands. What I'm saying here is, if he wanted gay sex, he could have demanded it in return for not firing someone, or for them to gain a promotion, or whatever. The opportunities were there for him, but he is not recorded as having taken them, and let's be honest here: if someone had been put in that compromising position, isn't it likely they would have come forward with an accusation after the murders? But nobody did, so we can assume it never happened.

So a man who is not - so far as we know or can be proven or shown - homosexual is probably unlikely to show much or any interest in, or have a sexual attraction to his sons. Were these girls, yeah maybe, but my own mind is made up that this was all, well, made up; it's just too convenient an excuse, a way of lessening the crime and making it look like the boys were the victims and all they were doing was protecting themselves.

Perhaps the most unbelievable part of the story though was when Lyle "admitted" he abused his brother, presumably having learned to do so from his father. In some ways, to me, this is like adding the final layer of shit on top of an already mucky cake; the embellishment that was not needed. What in fact did this serve to prove? That Lyle Menendez was as bad as his father? How was that going to help his case? I suppose he and his team thought that it might be seen to lessen his guilt if it could be shown that he was "emotionally damaged", and turn the jury against his late father. Seems like it was one act too far though.

However it seemed to be working. The Los Angeles Daily Journal agreed that his testimony, so far, was "compelling enough to, if nothing else, keep him off Death Row." That, of course, was up to the jury, but get the public on your side (and the Los Angeles Daily Journal is a legal newspaper, so we're talking lawyers here) and it's half the battle. Other details of Jose's cruelty seem easier to believe. We know he was not a nice man, had little time - no time really - for the weak, and certainly did not believe in pets, another distraction from the grand destiny he had planned for his sons, and the story of his beating a rabbit to death which Lyle would not get rid of at his behest is not a hard one to credit. The things he tried to attribute to his mother, on the other hand, do not ring true. He spoke of her pushing his face in sheets he had wet, like an animal, and refusing to change them (I suppose that could be true, but the idea would probably be more her laziness and lack of caring than any real attempt to punish him: you wet them, you sleep in them, sort of thing).

Even stranger was his contention that she sometimes forced him to sleep under her bed, where a ferret they had went to the toilet. I have no idea why anyone would or could do that, and I also don't believe Jose, proud in his own warped way of his boys, would allow such a thing. The idea of her rubbing her bloodstained hand in his face after she cut it on a door and blaming him, well yeah I could see that. Nobody is saying - certainly not me - that Kitty Menendez wasn't a deeply disturbed woman. We've seen evidence of this already, and the above sounds like something she would do, refusing to take responsibility for something she had done and looking to not only blame someone else, but transfer any guilt or anger she had at it to them, essentially passing on her pain, as if perhaps this made her no longer feel it, though of course pain doesn't act that way. But a lot of it is in the mind, and maybe she could convince herself, if she unloaded it onto Lyle, that it didn't hurt as much, or even at all.

Lyle then spoke of his collection of toy animals. I'm not quite sure what this was meant to convey. Perhaps it was to illustrate how detached from reality his life had become, perhaps it was to show that his parents cared so little about him that he was able - that it was necessary - to retreat into a fantasy world of Cookie Monsters and Kermits, and the fact that this continued until he was seventeen is disturbing indeed. But unless he was trying to show that he was still immature at this age, and perhaps therefore not mentally responsible, I don't see how it helped. At any rate, he certainly grew up, as such, when he met his first girlfriend, Stacy Feldman.

And now the stuffed animals story makes sense.

Courting her, Lyle sent her a note from him and all his animal friends. Look, I've done the same for my sister, but only to make her happy and because of the situation she's in. I don't believe any of them are real, but yeah, they all have personalities and names and storylines too. The difference is I know what's real and what's not; Lyle's attempt to use these toys as a way of wooing his girl seems both childish and manipulative. What woman would be able to resist a man who is so soft emotionally and so vulnerable that he still plays with stuffed teddies? For the jury, it certainly seemed to strike a chord; the cold-blooded killer had metamorphosed, or perhaps devolved, in a short time to a harmless, lovable kid. Lansing's plan was working perfectly so far; the defence had the jury in the palm of their hands. And how they squeezed!

However perhaps then Lyle went a little off the track, returning to the abuse he supposedly suffered at the hands of his mother. He spoke of her washing him when he was young and sleeping with her, but then claimed this went on till he was eleven years old, which has to be hard to believe. He also claimed that his mother became "furious" when he rejected her advances and stopped sleeping in the parental bed, and that it coloured their relationship for the rest of his life - well, until he killed her that is. I suppose there could be supporting evidence for this in that he did give Kitty the longest and most brutal death of the two parents: Jose was shot outright, head blown away, but Kitty was hunted down like an animal as she crawled away, and took many wounds before she was finished off.

If she was the monster he painted her as, perhaps even worse than his father, then it could be accepted that he would have made her death as slow and painful as possible, within the limits of the time frame they had. That however does not correspond with what he told the cops, that she had to be killed because she could not live without their father. One way or the other, there was a lie there. Either Kitty was killed the way she was in a sort of sick revenge, and then the boys lied about why she had been shot, or she was simply brutally murdered because these were two stone-cold and money-obsessed killers, and the sexual abuse was then a lie. Can't have it both ways. To say nothing of a letter Lyle sent her in 1987, in which he was very friendly and wished her well. If someone has been sexually torturing you for years, this is not the kind of thing you write to them.

"Hi mom. How are you? Hope you're alright and hanging in there. I often worry about you. You're the only mother I have or could want." Right. Sounds like he was really scared of/hated her. A year's a long time, admittedly, but it seems very odd that in the same year - I don't know if it was after or before the incident - (1987) - Lyle had had a huge row with his mother who had torn the hairpiece off his head and snarled he didn't need it. Lyle had been suffering male pattern baldness from an early age and even his brother did not know about the hairpiece. Lyle had secured it with some sort of solvent so it really hurt (he said) when his mother ripped it off. There was no reason given for this outburst, which makes it harder to believe. Did Kitty suddenly lose it for no reason? Surely he must have known how unlikely this, and his even more fantastical follow-up, sounded to the jury?

They were supposed to accept that having seen Lyle's "big secret" revealed, Erik then decided to tell him that their father had not stopped abusing him. First, the idea that Jose Menendez would take any sort of order, or threat, from his son seems laughable, so the chances that Lyle even confronted him seem small, the chance that Jose acceded to his demand even smaller. But assuming that did happen, it seemed their father had perhaps just said what his son needed to hear, and went on doing what he was doing. Which was likely nothing, but in the context of Lyle Menendez's story, he was said to have continued the abuse. And now Lyle wanted the jury to believe that the two boys were going to threaten their father that if the abuse did not stop they would go to the authorities. As if they hadn't had a chance before, assuming any of this nonsense was true. What made them think they could go now, and what proof had they? Despite his general dislike in the community, Jose Menendez was a respected businessman, and indeed a figure to be feared. Were the cops likely to take the word of the boys over that of their father, without any evidence to back up their claims?

Kind of odd, too, how the maid reported nothing out of the ordinary on the day Lyle apparently confronted his father, and claimed the house was "in chaos" as he also pounced on Kitty, demanding to know why she had condoned the abuse? If there was that sort of row going on, isn't it more likely that - under oath - any servant, or anyone else in the house, would have heard it and have to testify to the uproar? Yet she said she heard nothing. I suppose it was a big house, and she could have been on the other side of it or something - doesn't make clear where she was - but even so, you would think that at some point she would have come within earshot of such a ruckus.

Listening to Lyle outline the lead-up to the killing, any jury person would have been somewhat convinced that the two boys felt in fear of their lives, but then, it's really easy to put words into the mouth of a dead man or woman. There is no way to know, for instance, whether Jose sighed "What does it matter anymore?" when Erik asked about going to a tennis camp, or whether Kitty raged that her husband had ruined everything by not keeping his mouth shut. These all serve to colour and support the narrative, but they might just as easily never have been said. In fact, if you think about it (and it's hard to get into the mindset but if you try), if you're considering killing your kids would you not be careful to avoid dropping any hints, giving the game away? Would you not instead try to keep them in a false sense of security, pretend everything was alright, deter them from any suspicion? Yet here Lyle made several references to comments made that left the two of them in no doubt, apparently, that their lives were in danger.

The story Lyle told of the actual killing seems to bear little if any resemblance to the truth. He maintained that after an argument over the movies the two had rushed upstairs, loaded their shotguns and come down firing. He mentioned that Kitty had been pushed into the den by Jose, who had locked the doors, so how could she have got out and into the living room in order to be shot by her sons? There's no explanation for this: Lyle says he saw Jose push Kitty into the den and then he speaks of her crawling on the floor behind the sofa after her husband had been shot. So how had she got back into the room, and, if she heard shotgun reports, why? Who in their right mind goes towards danger when they are already locked away from it? By rights - if this is to be believed - she would have had to have been in the room, heard the shots, surely had an idea what was going on, found a way to unlock the door and plunged into the line of fire, completely defenceless. Why would anyone do that?

Also note: Lyle maintains he shot his father while  Jose was standing, and that he fell back onto the sofa. I don't think the forensic evidence supports this, rather that Jose was already sitting when he was hit. That being the case, then the story is false, and you'd have to wonder why he changed it when he could have just said he came in through the door firing and Jose was sitting down and not expecting an attack. At least that might have tied in a little with the actual facts.

Speaking of facts, testimony from Jamie Pisarcik, Lyle's former girlfriend, would come back to haunt him when the prosecution began cross-examining him. To cast doubt on the claim that Jose was a sex-obsessed pervert, Jamie told a story wherein Lyle had asked her to make up a story about his father assaulting her sexually, which he would then pay her for. She refused, and made it quite clear that  Jose had never gone near her. As a piece of evidence, this showed how desperate Lyle was to try to paint his father in the worst light possible, and surely tied in to the pre-meditated nature of the murders. If Lyle (and Erik, but mostly Lyle, who was clearly the mastermind behind the slaying) wanted to be able to say that they had killed their parents because of abuse suffered at their hands, then the more of a lech and a pervert they could make Jose look, the more their story would stand up. But here, with Jamie Pisarcik's testimony, that part of it came tumbling down.

However - and I don't quite understand this - instead of the prosecution introducing this evidence it was allowed for the defence to do it, as a way I suppose of controlling what was released, but either way it didn't help. When Bozanich did get to cross-examine him it took four days, and though Lyle  held up well under her relentless barrage of questions (I imagine you could characterise it more as an interrogation, as the opposite side will often seem to be in any case - good cop bad cop) he did trip a few times, such as when he described his life as a living hell, and then had to retrace this when the prosecutor pointed out that he and Erik had, by and large, lived a life of luxury. The callous murder of his mother also stuck in the jury's craw, especially as he made it clear he believed that she was trying to escape when he shot her.

This was the age of televised court cases, and Court TV were having a field day with the case. Their reporter, Gerry Spence, believed Lyle had done well but that there was little to no emotion in his voice, and he believed that Bozanich was, to some extent, allowing the defendant to control the narrative (a holdover from what his father had taught him no doubt: always be the one to control things), and while the general populace seemed to dislike both of the boys, those who had suffered abuse in their lives looked to be on their side. In this age, more than any other, with the coming of network television and before the internet had a proper hold on the world, defendants were basically tried in two courts, the law court and that of public opinion. Of course, the latter had no legal power, but even so, what the jury heard on the street and on the TV when they went home for the night was bound to affect them, even if they tried to ensure it did not.

And then it was time for Erik to take the stand.

[Trollheart]

The defence could only have been in fear of how he would react. Lyle, the older brother, the one seen as the driving force behind the plan, was a tough, resilient, even cold man, well able to fence with Bozanich and turn her words against her, able to meet the eyes of the jury and - most likely - lie through his teeth convincingly. Erik, on the other hand, was the weaker of the two, the younger, the one who was more sensitive. He had broken down after the murder, and it had been Lyle who had had to keep it together when the cops came. How would he fare now, away from his brother's protection, out of the sheltering arms of his god (as he had once described his brother), all alone in a small box and subjected to the laser-sharp focus of Bozanich's interrogation? If anyone were to break, she must have known her best shot was with the younger Menendez, and she was not about to go easy on him.

The problem here was twofold. First, all the "good bits", to use an entirely inappropriate term (if this wasn't all made up) had already been heard by the jury. If the abuse was real, then both had suffered more or less the same, and so there really wasn't much new to be revealed. The shock, such as it was, had been already felt and Erik was now treading over old ground. Not that repeating it might make the abuse seem less in the eyes of the jury, but the first time you hear something shocking you react, the second time, not so much. Add to that the fact that, perhaps despite expectations to the contrary, Erik Menendez was not overly emotional on the stand - in fact, after an initial tearful outburst it was said he looked more mentally deranged than upset - and the impact of his testimony further withered. In fact, it might even seem that having Erik testify all but damaged the case, as the sympathy that had been begun to be built up for his brother started to slowly evaporate.

As well as that, Erik's contention that his mother was spying on them, had tape-recordings of conversations they had had and had tapped their phone lines is not backed up by any evidence. If such recording equipment existed, surely the police would have found it? But nothing is mentioned, so it had to be made up. Kitty would not have had the time - or indeed, thought it necessary - to get rid of it, as she had no idea she was about to be killed, so if it was there, where did it go? Another piece of nonsense that helps both show that these two killers were not anywhere near as clever as they thought they were, and that they were making things up. And they surely were. And I think they went too far, tried to be too graphic. In Erik's account of the alleged abuse, he spoke of his father sticking pins and tacks into him in various places. As a counterbalance to that, a local rag had the so-called story of a hooker whom Jose had used for "rough sex", but seemed to entail only (!) choking. If Jose was  this depraved, would he not have broached the subject of this kind of treatment with the woman, and even if she had - probably quite rightly and sanely - told him to fuck off, would she not, if they were trying to paint him as a monster, have mentioned that this was what he wanted to do, even if she refused? But all she could come up with was that he liked to choke her. Sick, but not necessarily that big a deal.

It now also emerged that Jose - surprise, surprise! - was homophobic. Now, I suppose there are some ways people like that can get around and justify and excuse sex with boys, convincing themselves that it's not gay (though of course it is, but far worse than that) but if a man is that much against sex with other men - Jose was said to "hate gay people" - then why would he even be attracted to his sons? It really doesn't make any sense. And then Erik tried to say that he had begun putting cinnamon in his father's tea, so that his semen would taste better. How could anyone get away with putting cinnamon - a very strong, spicy taste - in what they drank without them noticing? As well as this, far from being the abuser and crazy person Erik and Lyle both described her as, Erik's first girlfriend, Jan, saw Kitty as a sister, and said she helped to hold the family together.

If anyone's ever watched Judge Judy, you'll know that one of her well-used maxims is that if you tell the truth you don't have to have a good memory. This is, in fact, inaccurate; you could easily have a bad memory and be trying to tell the truth, and in fact our memories work, as I have recently found, in such a way that we don't actually remember what happened, but the last time we remember remembering, if you understand. Our memories are predicated on the most recent data, like computers that have been recently backed up, but the original files may have been overwritten, lost or changed since then. I've seen this in action myself; something I was certain was true turns out to be not at all as I remembered it, as I watch the evidence myself and say "But I could have sworn..." So our memories are not actually reliable, unless I suppose you're someone who has an eidetic (photographic) memory.

However, leaving that to one side, the other half of that quote is true, mostly: if you lie, you have to keep remembering what the lie is. This is of course why when two people have been accused of and arrested for a crime, the police will interview each separately, to see if their stories match, to see, in effect, if they are lying, if they both tell - or remember - the same lie. It can, I'm sure, be very hard to keep all the details straight, and this pressure to keep lying, and lying properly, would have a devastating effect on the defence as one of the boys' lies would be revealed in stark and stunning effect. And like any attorney who knows he has an ace up his sleeve, Kuriyama would lead his victim into the trap slowly and with relish before snapping the steel jaws tight on him, and leaving him nowhere to go.

A major part of the Menendezes' story was that they had looked in the Big 5 store at guns, but had decided not to purchase there due to the fifteen-day waiting period, which they could not afford to observe. After ensuring that Erik knew exactly what he was saying, after removing any doubt or the possibility of misunderstanding or misinterpretation, after getting Erik to repeat his words so that the boy was completely aware of what he was swearing to, Kuriyama dropped the bomb. He told Erik - and the jury - that the Big 5 stores had ceased carrying handguns a year prior to the boys supposedly shopping and seeing them there for sale. Gasps erupted around the courtroom. The hearts of the defence team must have sunk. Erik looked outmanoeuvred and shocked, unsure what to say in the face of such damning contradiction of what he had sworn to be the truth. The best he could do was stutter that maybe it wasn't a Big 5 store - but hadn't they the receipt?

Apart from anything else, this huge blunder - and it was huge - threw a bright, sharp light on the defence team of Abramson. Why had her people not checked to see if the Big 5 did carry guns at that time? Why had they allowed such an important piece of evidence elude them, and show their clients up for the liars they were? And if they had not checked that, what else had they missed? What else might the surely now feeling triumphant prosecution team reveal? Was their entire case now to be blown apart due to a lack of thoroughness in checking facts? One final thought before the prosecution finished its cross-examination, one last shot across the bows, a grenade launched into the defence. Kuriyama showed a picture of the death scene, in which it could be seen there was an application form for UCLA ready to be filled out. If the parents were planning to kill their children, he asked, if, as Jose had sighed, "it didn't matter any more", then why were they bothering to fill in the application?

As they say, mic drop.

However, there was of course no way that Abramson and her team were going to allow testimony as to whether or not Erik and Lyle had been abused to hang only on the boys' own accounts, and as in any alleged abuse case (though this was not, as Pam Bozanich pointed out sharply, an abuse case but a murder one), the experts were wheeled in. As is quite often the case with experts, they don't like their opinions to be challenged, and so it was with the first, Dr. Ann Tyler. As she constantly focused on the "abuse" Erik has supposedly undergone, she made no reference to the murder and kept calling him a "child". Bozanich set her straight, asking questions like, had she even read Oziel's notes (she hadn't) and if she seriously considered the jewel burglary that the two had pulled off as "acting out" and a "prank"? Her most damning question was saved for last, when she snapped "How does a child suffer abuse from year zero?" in response to Tyler's contention that, somehow, Erik and Lyle had both been abused before they were born! What happened? Jose shout at them in the womb? Punch Kitty in the stomach?

Her badgering was so bad that the usually hard-as-nails Abramson was moved to request an admonition from the judge for Bozanich's treatment of the witness, claiming (with a straight face, mind) that it was "disrespectful". She was, of course, overruled. Tyler left the witness box a lot less confident and sure of herself than she had been when she had entered it. Bozanich even noted that she felt sorry for her, that it was nothing personal, just her job. Kuriyama had no such qualms, and believed she deserved everything she got. The second defence witness, Professor Ann Burgess, an expert in psychiatric mental health, claimed that the murder had not been pre-planned, and introduced a phrase nobody had heard before to the case, but which the defence would no doubt use again and again: automatic pilot. It was a handy way of saying that the two Menendez brothers had no real control over their actions, that their senses had been heightened to the point where instinct had taken over and they just went along for the ride. Bozanich snarled at her if she knew what psychobabble was? Professor Burgess lied she did not: everyone knows what psychobabble is.

Trials like these ones bring all sorts of people out of the woodwork, and you can bet the crazies will come, too. And they did. Kuriyama received death threats, as did the judge and as an umbrella group, the prosecution. A woman stood outside bewailing the lack of sympathy being given to "abuse survivors", and as usual the late-night talk shows and comedy show discussed the trial, made up skits, lampooned the brothers. From what I've read anyway, just them: I see a Saturday Night Live sketch where the sympathy was clearly with the prosecution, and while there may have been others who were not, there's no accounts of them. That's not to say that all of America was against the Menendezes, but when SNL does a sketch and there are no real objections (or none mentioned anyway) it's usually a pretty clear indication that the majority at least of their viewers agree, or at least do not disagree or don't care enough to phone or write in.

Dr. Kerry English was a defence witness who caused a lot of trouble, though not from being adversarial or planting false images in the minds of jurors. He found evidence in Erik's medical records from 1977, where a note was made of a "hurt posterior pharynx, uvula and soft plate..." which are all in the throat and point to an injury there. This could, he said (and of course the defence claimed, had been) be due to being forced to swallow  Jose's cock. It could, however, he agreed  with Bozanich, be caused by many other factors. It was not proof, but it was the first support to what the boys had been claiming, the first actual possible proof of sexual assault that had not come from their stories alone.

Another doctor, this time Kitty's therapist, testified that not only had she been suicidal, but she had laid out plans as to how she was to kill herself. However this had been at the time when she had found out about Jose's lover, Louise. Unsurprisingly, Jose's colleagues spoke badly of him, calling him controlling, arrogant, vain. Nobody was sorry he was dead, or indeed surprised. But if you inch open a door you would rather remain closed, don't be surprised if your rival tries to boot it open all the way. Having brought up the issue of the Menendezes' mental state through the testimony of their expert witnesses, the defence had given Bozanich and her team leeway to demand the release of all of Oziel's tapes, which up to then the judge had very much restricted access to, allowing only one to be presented in evidence. The prosecution's argument that once the line was crossed, once Abramson had broached the issue of mental state, they should be able to explore that too, was a compelling one and hard to ignore. Weisberg said he would consider it.

Having weighed up the decisions made by the Supreme Court, the Superior Court and the Court of Appeal, Weisberg ruled that he agreed with all three and would not overrule their edicts. However, in the case of the tapes - particularly the December 11 session, the one Bozanich wanted, in which Lyle apparently laid out his plan to murder his parents - he made a ruling that they were not, as Abramson had contended originally, covered under attorney-client privilege, and he would therefore allow them into evidence. It was a shattering defeat for the defence, whose entire strategy would now have to be reshaped to try to limit the damage - indeed, possibly the carnage - that the revelations on that tape would cause. It could very well be the end of their case.

However, they were not going down without a fight. Resigned now to the fact that the tape would be played for the jury, the defence set Lansing the task of trying to mitigate its content by trying to turn the spotlight back on Dr. Oziel, and convincing the twelve men and women that what they were about to hear was an elaborately-staged deception, something orchestrated by the therapist to try to make the brothers look bad, and have something to blackmail them with. The tape showed Lyle talking about putting his mother out of her misery, as if it was a mercy killing, due to her suicidal nature and the fact that she could not be expected to live, or to want to live, without her husband. The biggest shock though, surely, for the jurors, was that all through the discussion, even when pressed as to why he believed Jose had to die, Lyle never once mentioned sexual abuse of any sort. He said his father was cold and controlling, and that he was ruining their mother's life, but nothing about any abuse.

The taped session also revealed a man markedly different to the picture both brothers, and the defence team, had painted of Jose Menendez. He was controlling and tough, yes, but there was a sense of responsibility and duty about him, Lyle believed he loved his sons and only wanted them to be the very best they could be. He even went so far as to describe one night when his father had broken down and cried. Hardly the portrait of a cold, unfeeling, dominating monster the jury had heard up to now. Then, most surprising of all, Erik, who had not really spoken for much of the tape, said he really missed his father and regretted having killed him. That did not sound like a boy who had been driven to bloody and brutal murder at the hands of a sexual predator, a kid who had finally had enough and done what he felt he needed to do to be rid of his tormentor.

Rather amazingly, and surely insultingly, Lyle made the case that Kitty had actually tacitly given permission for them to kill her; that she had wanted to commit suicide but was too weak or frightened to go through with it. But she wanted to die, and Lyle arrogantly claimed that what they had done, he and Erik, in killing their parents took "courage beyond belief." The conversation on the tape totally contradicted their story that they rushed upstairs in a panic, loaded their guns in fear of their lives and came down shooting. In a calm, unhurried and flat voice, Lyle seemed to shrug  "She gave us permission -  kill me, kill us before you leave," and he noted "the time was now." To gasps around the courtroom, he likened losing his parents to losing his pet dog. As Conte left the courthouse he was heard to say that he believed the tape had "sunk" the two brothers, though then adding that he thought they had already been sunk.

The revelations on the tape were clearly a big problem for the defence, who did their best to brush them aside, but were not blind. Most tellingly, they made it quite clear that, despite what both of the boys had claimed, neither revenge for alleged sexual abuse practiced on them both, nor fear for their lives figured in the murder of their parents. They had coldly, clinically decided  Jose had to die, and that Kitty would not be able to live when he was dead, so that her murder was seen by them more in the light of a mercy killing. Perceptions had certainly been turned  on their head, and the cold, flat voice of Lyle Menendez recounting their plan to Oziel must have put the chills up some, if not all, members of the jury.

But they had what might be called the turncoat witness, Judalon Smyth, Oziel's ex-lover, and the one who had, as she had said herself at the time "delivered the brothers to the prosecution on a silver platter." Now claiming she had been brainwashed by her lover and had had memories and suggestions implanted, and that he had been threatening her, and in apparent anger at her case against him for rape not being taken by the D.A., Smyth was testifying for the defence, and doing her best to unravel most of the evidence she had given Bozanich and Zoeller, trying to say it was all made up on Oziel's instructions, or at least tailored by him to his desires. Mind you, she doesn't sound like she's playing with a full deck: some sort of nonsense about a "Sex IOU contract" between her and Oziel, witnessed by her two cats? Right. A very reliable witness then.

Finally, after nearly three months, Abramson and her team was done. The defence rested.

It was now the prosecution's turn.

[Trollheart]

The first and perhaps most important task Bozanich had was to try to rehumanise the two victims, who, in the flurry of pseudo-psychiatry, had somehow been pushed to the side. As the lead prosecutor had told the press the previous day, she had to keep reminding herself there were two dead bodies in the case, the defence having twisted and warped the trial into all other sort of shapes, and misdirected and redirected the attention of both the jury and the judge, as well as the public. What should have been a simple enough murder trial had now  become a test of America's reaction to child abuse, even if this was only alleged. The focus had been too much for the last few months on why the brothers had killed their parents, not how they were going to pay for such a crime. With an admission of guilt, however, it seems unlikely to me, at best, that they could be acquitted. Nevertheless, they might face some charge of diminished responsibility or mitigating factors which would shorten their sentence. I suppose they could have been found not guilty. I'm not really sure how the law works in that regard; if you've admitted you did it, can you still be let free?

Bozanich began calling witnesses who were tied to the Menendez family by blood. First though there was a pool cleaner, Grant Walker, who was able to testify that, contrary to their story that they had stayed away - ostensibly in fear - from their parents on the day of the killing, he had seen both boys there with their mother, and both seemed to be arguing with and cursing at her. Unlike many of the witnesses Abramson had already demolished, like the cop from New York who had been detailed to drive Erik around, Walker did not crack, and stuck calmly to his story. The maid, Flor Suria, testified she had heard no argument on the day in question, and also refuted the suggestion that there were pornographic magazines in the house, especially homosexual ones.

Jamie Pisarcik was persuaded to take the stand, and testified she had broken up with Lyle when he had admitted, from jail, that they had killed their parents. She also blew a hole in another contention of the defence, that it had been the sight of Lyle's hairpiece that had shocked his brother into confessing to him about the so-called abuse, making it clear Erik had seen the wig long before that, so his story could not be true. She also revealed that Lyle had sent her to the law library in Santa Monica, looking for files on cases in which children had been found not guilty after killing parents believed to have been abusing them. Of course her testimony did not go unchallenged, and Abramson did all she could to discredit the girl, scoring some points. Brian Andersen, Kitty's brother, however, held his nerve better, and dropped a bombshell for both defence and prosecution when he casually admitted his sister had been in therapy. Jose's secretary spoke of Lyle rather callously wearing his father's shoes the day after the memorial service and joking about being able to fill them.
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The Hammer of Justice Falls, But...

Finally, the case was over. Both the prosecution and the defence had presented their cases, and rested on December 3. To the defence's dismay, Judge Weisberg refused to allow the jury to consider a verdict of not guilty, but did instruct them that they could bring one in of manslaughter if they felt that was appropriate. However on January 13 (for Erik) and 27 (for Lyle)  the verdict returned was not one of manslaughter, nor was it murder. It wasn't any verdict. The jury was hung and Weisberg had to declare a mistrial. This could be seen as a victory for the defence, but at least it didn't mean the brothers avoided a verdict of guilty of murder, and the DA promised he would try the case again. Which he did.

With this time limited evidence allowed by Weisberg of the so-called sexual abuse, and no cameras allowed in the court, the jury found both brothers guilty of first-degree murder and they were sentenced to life without the possibility of parole. They only avoided the death penalty due to their previous lack of a criminal record, and no doubt due to their money and contacts. The jury this time rejected completely the idea that the two had killed their parents in fear of their lives, and the whole thing was reduced to what it most likely was: murder for greed and gain. Ironically, reflecting the great Charles Dickens in Bleak House, as the original trial wound on their parents' estate was all but swallowed up to pay the costs of their expensive defence team, so even had they been somehow acquitted (which was never an option) they would not have stood to inherit the fortune they had expected, and for which they had murdered both their parents.

Erik Menendez and Lyle Menendez, inseparable as brothers to the point where they teamed up to kill together, were finally split up, sent to different prisons, and did not see each other again for another twenty-two years, when they were finally reunited in 2018, housed in the same cell block. Multiple appeals were constantly turned down by superior and state courts. Both brothers eventually married, Lyle's first lasting a mere five years, from 1996 to 2001, whereupon he remarried two years later. Erik married in 1999.

It may have taken a very long time, but eventually the lies of the Menendez brothers fell on deaf ears, and, mostly hated by America - probably, it has ot be said, more for the fact that they were rich kids who seemed about to get away with murder than out of any real remorse for the deaths of their parents - the two arrogant rich scions of the business mogul who had callously but successfully driven everyone before him, crushing those in his path, determined to leave behind a legacy he could be proud of, will spend the rest of their miserable lives in a small jail cell, dreaming perhaps of what might have been.

Of course there were the movies, the TV documentaries and many books written about the crimes and the trials of the Menendez brothers, but that's only to be expected. Unfortunately, few people want to read about saints, or philanthropists, or even heroes who save people; well, the last, maybe, but those who read about their exploits will soon forget them, whereas the stories of evil remain in our minds and, sadly, our hearts. As Shakespeare's Marc Antony said in Julius Caesar, "the evil men do lives after them", or to put it in more modern parlance, evil sells.