But when family members kill each other, the straightforward facts are often the least important part of the story. For three years the brothers sat in jail, protesting their innocence, while the courts debated whether prosecutors could use the most damning evidence against them, the taped notes of Erik’s therapist. Only months after the California Supreme Court ruled last year that the tapes were admissible did the brothers admit to the killings. And only as their trial began last week did their lawyers unveil their new defense: that Lyle and Erik shot their parents after Jose threatened to kill them to keep secret his years of sexual abuse. But so lurid were the details of what Lyle and Erik allegedly suffered at their parents’ hands that the lawyers’ real strategy seemed far more audacious: to convince the jury that Jose and Kitty were so awful they deserved to die.
“This trial will take you behind the facade of the rich house and fancy cars, the wealthy friends and the rich social engagements,” promised Lyle’s defense attorney, Jill Lansing; and if you always believed life must be hell there, you won’t be disappointed. With the possible exception of Satanism, if you’ve heard it on “Donahue,” it went on behind the gates of the $3.5 million Menendez mansion, according to Lansing and Leslie Abramson, who represents Erik: sexual abuse of both boys from a young age by Jose, with the acquiescence of Kitty, herself a violent alcoholic and drug addict given to sadistic punishments such as bringing the sheets to the breakfast table to humiliate Lyle when he wet his bed–which he was still doing at 14. Behind “the facade of the rich house” the Menendez family apparently kept a ferret, which defecated under the parents’ bed, where Lyle would be sent when he misbehaved. When Erik’s swimming disappointed his father, Abramson told the transfixed jurors and the even-more-trans-fixed audience of journalists and screenwriters, Jose held him underwater until he almost drowned; when the boy cried after an injection, Jose decided to toughen him up by torturing him with needles, ropes and “wooden implements.”
True to the conventions of family-abuse stories, the Menendezes were regarded by most outsiders as an unusually close and devoted family. Jose, who emigrated from Cuba as a teenager and made his fortune as an executive with Carolco Pictures and Live Entertainment, a video-distribution company, was intensely proud of his sons and attended all their athletic contests; Lyle had been a varsity tennis player at Princeton, which he attended for less than a year before dropping out over plagiarism charges. Jose was also a tough, demanding father, whom even a prosecution source describes as “kind of a bastard.” But, the source contends, “there was never any indication that he beat the kids or sexually abused them. If he were your father you might be mad at him, but you wouldn’t have a justification for killing him.” The defense apparently will build its case mostly on the testimony of psychologists who inter-viewed the boys in jail. “These cases are difficult to prove,” admits Paul Mones, a lawyer who helped put the defense case together. “As prosecutors well know, these crimes [of child abuse] are written in disappearing ink….But time and again, you find that when the child fires the gun, they explode the veil of secrecy.” Whatever secrets the Menendez family once had, they are now spread out for the world to see. Having killed their parents, the sons are now trying to save themselves by killing again, laying waste to their victims’ good names. jurors will decide how sorry to feel for them.
