Trollheart's Most Evil
 

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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, in certain parts of the world homosexuality was seen as evil; 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 was not actually encouraged, they wasn’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.
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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, 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.
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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. Torture, now seen as vile and evil (and useless) was once the tool of kings and queens, 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 will be seen by 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 either as 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.
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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 accept the 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 two 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…
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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, in 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
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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.
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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
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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. 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.
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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.
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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 in reality - 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.
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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!

Okay what is this thread about?

Flower arranging.

I was considering suggesting Fred & Rosemary West (if you haven't done them), but who am I kidding? I'd rather listen to a podcast.

Thanks. I'm going to try to not be too obvious, and like my Food for the Crows journal, this won't be just about murderers, otherwise it would be just like my serial killers one. I'm also going to avoid featuring anyone who is or will be in the serial killers journal, as there's no point in doing something twice. So we could have possibly Ian Huntley, who doesn't quite qualify as a serial killer, but does certainly qualify as evil, or maybe Scott Peterson. But it will be a while before I go back to a murderer, as I want to explore the whole nature of evil, and down through history too. So the next one will be someone who is evil for other reasons. Thinking maybe Pol Pot, possibly Vlad Dracul or Caligula, or Bin Laden or even Saville? Probably Saville actually. Haven't decided. But this will take a little while to get through first, so I have a lot of work ahead of me with even this first example. No rest for the wicked! Or the evil...
:shycouch:

Hey, a thought: what about Ed Sheeran?
:laughing:
Nah, can't pick people who are that evil! Got to have standards....

Saw a doc on Jimmy Saville. Really chilling. Shame the public didn't really know until after he was dead.

The frustrating thing about that is how so many in positions of power and influence DID know, but without actual solid proof they were all terrified to make any sort of legal accusation due to the connections he had, including those in the underworld. They waited till he was dead before they moved, and of course by then it was too late.

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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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

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.
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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.
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“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.

Those were some bad dudes. I didn't know much about them prior to this, so thanks for the history lesson.

This reminds me of Paul Bernardo.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Bernardo

Oh there's more to come. So much more. We haven't even got to the murders yet, never mind the trials. Stay tooned, as they say.

I usually don't read true crime/evil/horror stuff, but your Menendez stuff history is fascinating, TH. Very well done. I remember vaguely hearing about the Menendez brothers in junior tennis circuit days. The father had a brutal reputation.

Thanks hon. It's nice to know I have a couple of readers at least. Good to have you along, and I'm honoured to have been able to sway you from your aversion to murder/evil subjects, if only this one. MWA-HAH-HAH-HAH-HAAAAA!

Sorry.
:shycouch:

:laughing:
Thanks! Can't wait for the continuation.......https://www.animated-smileys.com/emo...zHekgBeuxt.gif

I remember watching parts of the trial on Court TV (US). Time to go to YouTube and *reminisce*.

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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.
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(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.
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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.

Beverly Hills Cops: Interrogation and Investigation

Detective 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.

He as well as the beat cops who had responded first to the 911 call were 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.
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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.
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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 to 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.

That's.....quite the story.

You knew this was coming....
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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. 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.

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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.
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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
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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.
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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.
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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?

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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?
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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.
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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.
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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!
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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.



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.
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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 the author of the book 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.