Robbery Ruled Out as Motive : Slain Couple’s Son Says Nothing Was Taken From Home

The eldest son of slain entertainment executive Jose E. Menendez said Friday that robbery could not have been a motive for the killing of his father and mother because nothing was taken from the family’s Beverly Hills mansion.

“Nothing was missing,” Lyle Menendez said. “Robbery wasn’t a motive.”

Menendez, 45, the chief executive of Live Entertainment of Van Nuys, a firm that buys video rights to feature films, and his wife, Mary Louise (Kitty) Menendez, 44, were discovered shot to death in their North Elm Drive home by their two sons, Lyle, 21, and Eric, 18.

A memorial service was held for Menendez on Friday in a screening room at the Hollywood headquarters of the Directors Guild of America. Another memorial service is planned for Monday in a chapel on the campus of Princeton University in New Jersey, where the family lived a few years ago and where Lyle attended school.

Shot Several Times

The Los Angeles County coroner’s office, after an autopsy of both bodies, said the entertainment executive and his wife had been shot several times. But, at the request of Beverly Hills police, the coroner refused to divulge any other details.

From family comments Friday, there was clearly a consensus that the apparent double homicide was premeditated. But the family is still debating whether it was mob-ordered, as some in the media have speculated. Menendez headed a company that had purchased two firms that had previously been linked with organized crime.

After the memorial service Friday, the slain executive’s sister echoed this theory.

The sister, Marta Menendez-Cano of West Palm Beach, Fla., told the Associated Press that her brother and his wife were killed because Jose Menendez refused to do business with mobsters.

Angered Mobsters

The sister said that in her opinion, her brother angered mobsters for taking over International Video Entertainment, which had previously distributed X-rated films, and then cleaning house.

“Because of his success, he probably was stepping on many shoes, which some people didn’t like,” Menendez-Cano said.

But Friday night, Lyle Menendez, talking with a Times reporter before leaving for Princeton, N.J., for the second memorial service, said he did not believe that his aunt’s theory is entirely correct.

Still, he said, the family was all but convinced that the slayings were calculated. “Someone was trying to send a message,” he said. But no one in the family has yet deciphered that message, he added.

Beverly Hills police have clamped a tight lid of secrecy on their investigation. No suspects have been identified.

More than 100 family members, friends and associates attended the memorial service Friday for Menendez and his wife. During the tribute, Menendez’s colorful personal history emerged.

After arriving in the United States from Cuba at 16, Menendez slept in the attic of a Pennsylvania farmhouse, relatives said.

Menendez’s father, Jose Francisco, a former world-class soccer player, and his mother, Maria Carlotta, a former Olympic swimmer, sent Menendez to the United States in 1960 after worrying that their son would turn to communism if he remained in Fidel Castro’s Cuba, relatives said.

It worked. A little more than 10 years later, Menendez was the president of his first company.

Goal Recalled

“He used to tell us that when he came to the U.S., he didn’t speak much English . . . but he said he made it his goal to run one of the largest companies in America,” said one of his sons, Eric Menendez.

Menendez was eager to begin working full time after finishing high school. Already a winning salesman, he considered selling encyclopedias, relatives said. But he was persuaded to attend college in Illinois. There he met his future wife in a philosophy class. A short time later, Mary Louise, known as Kitty, and Jose, 18 and 19 years old, were married.

“I told him that was his first acquisition in the entertainment business,” said Devendra Mishra, executive vice president of Live Entertainment. “She was an athlete and a serious performer.”

The couple moved to New York, where Kitty worked as a schoolteacher and Menendez completed a degree in accounting at Queens College in 1967. Five years later, Menendez was named president of a small container company, and he went on to begin a 14-year career with RCA Corp., eventually serving as the head of RCA/Ariola Records until 1986.

That year, Menendez quit RCA to take over an ailing video distribution and duplication firm in Newbury Park that he reorganized into the now profitable Live Entertainment. Menendez and his family moved from Princeton, N.J., to Calabasas.

Called Charismatic Leader

Live Entertainment executives and relatives who spoke at the service said Menendez was a charismatic leader who sometimes used humor to soften his hard-driving competitive spirit.

“I used to have arguments with my father all the time,” Lyle Menendez said. “And I rarely won one.”

Kitty’s brother, Brian Anderson, said his sister was a competitive, precocious “tomboy” while growing up.

“As competitive and aggressive as she was, it intensified when she and Jose married,” Anderson said. “Jose certainly had met his challenge when he and Kitty became man and wife.”

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Correction

Mary Louise (Kitty) Menendez was 47 when she died, not 44.

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