Father Was Tyrannical, Lyle Menendez Testifies : Trial: Defendant says he was taught to hide emotions and regard others as inferior. He also says his father raped him.

With his dead father’s picture glowering over his shoulder, Lyle Menendez testified Monday that the man he killed was a tyrant who drilled him to hide emotions, fix “flaws” and regard others as inferior.

The 25-year-old defendant began his second day on the stand in a subdued tone as he prepared to tell jurors how he and his brother, Erik, 22, came to kill their millionaire parents with shotguns and why they claim self-defense.

Lyle Menendez’s attorney, Jill Lansing, posted a somber portrait of entertainment executive Jose Menendez. “That’s my dad,” Lyle said.

He recalled his father’s rigorous training sessions, severe punishments and insistence that their family was superior to all others.

He recited a speech he said he learned by rote: “I was not born into this world to fail nor does failure course through my veins. I am not a sheep and I refuse to walk and talk with the sheep. I will not hear those who weep and moan. Their disease is contagious.”

The brothers are charged with murdering Jose and Kitty Menendez on Aug. 20, 1989, in their Beverly Hills mansion.

Prosecutors claim the brothers killed to gain a $14-million inheritance. But Lyle Menendez said Friday that fear was the motive. He said his father raped him when he was 7 but stopped abusing him when he turned 8 to focus on his young brother.

When he was 13, he said Monday, he psyched himself up to confront his father about sexual abuse of Erik Menendez.

“I’d put on a slow Lionel Richie record I had and concentrate,” he recalled. “My dad taught me to do this. I wanted to be relaxed and brace myself for this.”

After the talk, he said, his brother gave him the impression that things had changed.

He said his mother became “like a recluse in the house. She didn’t want to talk to anyone. You’d just stay away from her.”

He also called her abusive and uncaring. But he said his father and mother fought physically and added: “I felt sorry for her. I always felt sorry for her.”

Often, Lyle Menendez said, his father would read from a book titled “The Greatest Salesman in the World,” propounding his philosophy of superiority.

“That was the theme, that other kids weren’t trained in the same way I was. They didn’t have the blood line. They suffered the disease of mediocrity and their mediocrity was contagious.”

He said his father quizzed him at the dinner table.

“He’d say, ‘What did you think about today?’ I’d say, ‘I concentrated on staying away from other kids, concentrated on sports,’ all the things he wanted me to say . . . and he’d say, ‘Good. Good.’ ”

If he gave the wrong answers, Lyle Menendez said, “He’d yank me from the table and take me and punish me.”

Punishment included being thrown out of the house in winter, he said, and he would take refuge in the dog house where he kept a secret stash of blankets.

He said his father referred to his younger brother as a sissy and excluded him from their philosophical discussions.

The constant theme, he said, was: “I will master my emotions. . . . If I am sad I will laugh. If I feel fear I will plunge ahead. If I feel poverty I will think of wealth to come. . . . It was a sign of weakness to show emotion, to be too happy or too sad.”