‘I Just Jumped and I Shot’--Kyle : Son Tells Jury His Version of Killing of Multimillionaire

A gloomy Ricky Kyle, scion of multimillionaire real estate tycoon Henry Harrison Kyle, related for the first time in court Wednesday his version of how he shot and killed his father during a pre-dawn hunt for an intruder in their Bel Air Estates mansion. He said he fired after his father fired a shot that struck him.

Portraying his father as a rigid, irascible bully who had tormented him physically and emotionally for much of his life, the 22-year-old Kyle testified that he was awakened on July 22, 1983, by the sound of crunching leaves outside his bedroom window.

Kyle said he got a handgun that he had stowed under his bed and woke his father, who got his own handgun.

Searched Grounds

Together they searched the mansion’s grounds for an intruder, Kyle said.

Finding no one, they re-entered the dimly lit house, where Kyle said he noticed an open glass door.

His father walked toward the door, he said.

“I could see my dad’s silhouette,” said Kyle, who has been on trial since Oct. 22 for premeditated murder in the death of his 60-year-old father. “I came behind him and then he turned and he came up with his arm (holding a .357 Magnum) and he shot. . . .

“I just jumped and I shot,” Kyle added.

“And then what?” asked Michael P. Gibson, a defense attorney who had painstakingly led Kyle through a litany of purported beatings and humiliations endured at the hands of his self-made-businessman father.

“I tried to get away from him,” Kyle said. “I started swinging my arms. I was pushing. I was trying to get away. And then the gun . . . my gun . . . went off again. . . .

“I ran,” Kyle said. “I didn’t know what I had done. I didn’t know what had happened. I just ran. I was scared.”

The younger Kyle had been wounded in the elbow.

The elder Kyle, according to testimony from a medical examiner, had been shot at close range in the back.

Ricky Kyle said he threw his gun away in the yard and went back into the house, where others had by then awakened.

He said he told the others and, later, police that an intruder had shot his father.

“I was scared,” he said, pausing momentarily, “to tell the truth.”

Kyle’s half-sister, Jackie Phillips, testified earlier in the trial that he confessed to her that he had shot his father twice--the second time “because he still wasn’t dead” and wore gloves “so there wouldn’t be powder burns when he shot him.”

Phillips, a 29-year-old former model, testified that the confession was made in Dallas while she, her half-brother and her then-fiance smoked cocaine shortly after the elder Kyle was buried.

The elder Kyle was a Texas-based real estate developer who had become head of a major Hollywood television syndication company--Four Star International Inc.--several months before his death. His personal life was tempestuous. He had been married five times and had several children, who for much of their lives did not know of each other’s existence.

The prosecutor, Deputy Dist. Atty. Lewis Watnick, asserted in his opening statement to jurors that Ricky Kyle “executed” his father because he feared that he would be cut out of his father’s will. The elder Kyle left an estate of $22 million.

Kyle testified that he had not known that he was included in his father’s will. He said his father had told him a year before the shooting that he had been cut out, and later frequently threatened to cut him out.

(In fact, a will filed in Dallas gave almost all the Kyle estate to Ricky and a brother. The will was contested by the elder Kyle’s last wife and the parties made a sealed settlement.)

Called Justifiable

Defense attorney Gibson argued in his opening statement that the killing was justifiable under the law.

Kyle told jurors how his father had abused him repeatedly since the age of 6, sometimes in the presence of friends--punching him in the face and striking him with a bullwhip for offenses such as drinking sodas, making too much noise, reading, failing to play sports to his father’s standards, and crying.

“I stopped crying at about 14,” Kyle said.

Dubbed ‘Little Girl’

He said his father would introduce him to friends as his “little girl.”

On one occasion, he said, he saw the elder Kyle severely beat a girlfriend. And he said his father had threatened him with death several times.