Lyle Menendez Says Stuffed Toy ‘Family’ Was His Refuge : Trial: Murder defendant describes a fantasy world that offered an escape from a controlling father and an unstable mother. Testimony is again cut short because of his illness.

Lyle Menendez, testifying for a third day in his murder trial, said Wednesday that his father was so controlling and his mother so emotionally unstable that he sought comfort in his “own family” of stuffed animals.

In testimony cut short by a recurrence of his flu-like symptoms, the older of the Menendez brothers said his father, Jose Menendez, controlled everything in his life, from girlfriends to homework. His mother, Kitty, once left a suicide note that said she was “tired of it” and “checking out,” he said.

His extensive stuffed animal collection, Lyle Menendez said, “got me through the day, taking me out of where I was to this other world of friends.”

He added: “They were soft. They made me feel safer.”

The warmth and security of the toys has been a recurring theme for the 25-year-old as he testifies. He recalled them Wednesday while discussing his high school and college years, building toward a description--now expected in testimony Friday--of the night that he and his brother shot their parents to death.

Lyle and Erik Menendez, 22, are charged with first-degree murder in the Aug. 20, 1989, shotgun slayings of Jose Menendez, 45, a wealthy entertainment executive, and Kitty Menendez, 47, in the den of the family’s Beverly Hills mansion.

If convicted, the brothers could be sentenced to death.

Prosecutors contend that the brothers killed out of hatred and greed. The defense says the killings were an act of self-defense after years of physical, mental and sexual abuse.

Testimony Wednesday was limited. Lyle Menendez took the stand for an hour, then complained to Van Nuys Superior Court Judge Stanley M. Weisberg that he felt nauseated and unable to concentrate.

Weisberg, who had postponedtrial Tuesday because the defendant felt ill, called a recess and said he hoped that Lyle Menendez would be able to resume testimony Friday. Court is not in session today because of the Jewish New Year.

Erik Menendez is scheduled to testify next week, defense lawyer Leslie Abramson told Weisberg.

Abramson also said the defense case might go on for three weeks after Erik Menendez steps down. With a week after that for prosecution rebuttal, jurors probably will not begin deliberations until late October or early November.

Weisberg has said the case might last until Thanksgiving.

Before he left the witness stand, Lyle Menendez spoke softly of his stuffed animals, which filled his bed at home. He said he even bought his high school girlfriend a collection of 20 toys, many of them white teddy bears they named the Pookies.

“For me, if was very comforting,” he said. “You could have your own family in there in the room and play.

“As I got older,” he said, “it was embarrassing to me because stuffed animals are for little kids. But it was very important to me.”

The relationship with his high school steady broke up, however, because Jose Menendez disapproved of it, he said. So did two other relationships, Lyle Menendez said.

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But, he testified, his father once found him a new girlfriend who was a beauty queen, just as Kitty Menendez had been as a teen-ager.

Lyle Menendez said that when he was a freshman at Princeton University, his father would call, get his homework assignments, write them and deliver them overnight to school. Once, Lyle Menendez said, he got a bad grade when his father wrote an essay on Machiavelli’s “The Prince” but had not bothered to read the book.

When he was suspended from the university for a year for copying another student’s work, his father met with the university president in an effort to have the suspension lifted but failed, Lyle Menendez said.

About that time, he said, his mother learned that Jose Menendez had a mistress. Kitty Menendez began taking 13 pills a day, he said, and left a suicide note, which Erik Menendez found.

In the note, Kitty Menendez wrote that “she couldn’t handle the shame” and that she “was sorry she had to take this way out and she was leaving,” Lyle Menendez testified.

“I thought it was clearly a suicide letter. She wasn’t leaving town,” Lyle Menendez testified, adding that he suggested divorce to his mother as an alternative. That enraged her, he said, and he got a lecture:

“She said she never regretted a day that she was married to my father.”