Menendez Ends 9 Tense Days on Witness Stand : Trial: Prosecution takes final turn at older brother, who says parents’ subtle cues foretold plans to murder their children.

Seeking to repair damage from a driving cross-examination, Lyle Menendez concluded nine tense days of testimony Friday by asserting that his parents used subtle cues to control and terrorize their sons--until he and his brother ended their domination with shotgun blasts.

Both parents used hand and facial cues to signal impending punishment or violence, he said in response to questions from his attorney, Jill Lansing.

But in a final turn at the older Menendez brother, Deputy Dist. Atty. Pamela Bozanich asked him two questions: “What hand signals did your father give to you before you put a gun to the back of his head and pulled the trigger?”

Lyle Menendez said: “He didn’t give me any.”

Bozanich asked: “What signal was your mother giving you when she was sneaking away near the coffee table before you went out and reloaded?”

He said: “Nothing.”

He paused, then added: “I was just afraid at that point.”

Lyle Menendez, 25, and Erik Menendez, 22, are charged with first-degree murder in the slayings of their parents, Jose Menendez, 45, a wealthy entertainment executive, and Kitty Menendez, 47, in the TV room of the family’s Beverly Hills mansion Aug. 20, 1989.

If convicted, the brothers could be sentenced to death.

Looking preppy in a blue sweater and a pink and white striped shirt, Lyle Menendez smiled at jurors as he took the stand Friday for the last time, seeking eye contact with jurors and nodding hello. His nods were not returned.

His marathon stretch on the stand, including a great deal of repetitious testimony, appeared to have taken its toll on the jurors.

As his cross-examination neared an end Friday morning, with Bozanich again striving to point up inconsistencies, many jurors leaned back in their chairs, some folding their arms, most resting their chins in their hands.

At a break, one said to another: “Maybe we should do ‘the wave’ again.”

The juror raised her hands but did not stand up, as she did several weeks ago, when she and two other jurors did the popular sports arena “wave” in court.

After focusing Thursday on the night of the slayings, Bozanich used her final hour of Lyle Menendez’s testimony to flit from subject to subject, including his relationship with the key prosecution witness, Beverly Hills psychologist L. Jerome Oziel.

Lyle Menendez said he trusted Oziel enough to confess the killings to him, but not enough to confide the sexual abuse that both brothers say they endured at the hands of their parents. Nor did he tell Oziel that they killed their parents in self-defense.

“I didn’t want to tell him why,” Lyle Menendez said.

Bozanich also pursued Oziel’s testimony that the brothers hatched their plot to kill after watching a TV movie “on the BBC.”

Prosecutors say that is a reference to a TV movie about the Billionaire Boys Club--a group of privileged Los Angeles young men who committed murder in the 1980s--that aired three weeks before the Menendez slayings.

Lyle Menendez testified that he knew there had been a movie about such a group, but had not seen it before the killings.

Bozanich confronted him with a list of names contained on a piece of paper that jailers took in a June 8, 1990, search of the brothers’ cells in Los Angeles County Jail. In his own handwriting, third from the bottom on the list, Lyle Menendez had written “Brian Es.”

Lyle Menendez said Brian Eslaminia went to Beverly Hills High School with Erik Menendez. Brian Eslaminia’s brother, Reza, was a member of the Billionaire Boys Club and was convicted of murdering their father, a wealthy Iranian businessman.

But moments after Lyle Menendez left the witness stand, the prosecutor told reporters outside court that she believed her four days of cross-examination had gone “just fine.”

“I don’t think his cross-examination was any more unique than any other defendant’s,” she said. “But he was better dressed.”

Lyle Menendez’s lawyers, Jill Lansing and Michael Burt, declined to comment.

But Erik Menendez’s lead attorney, Leslie Abramson, said Lyle Menendez did very well for a “severely abused and psychologically traumatized youngster.”

Erik Menendez is due to take the stand Monday. Van Nuys Superior Court Judge Stanley M. Weisberg ruled Friday that Erik Menendez will deliver the bulk of his testimony before both juries in the trial, just as Lyle Menendez did.

Two juries are hearing the case, one for each brother.

Struggling Friday to find the right words, Lyle Menendez told the panelists that it had been “frustrating to describe” his parents, what his life was like and “why I felt the way I did that weekend.”

He testified repeatedly that he and his brother killed their parents late that night in response to fear that built from a confrontation with Jose Menendez three nights before. Lyle Menendez said he had threatened to go public with allegations that his father was a child molester.

“And I, I, I felt frustrated through this whole thing, not being able to express that in a way that is the same as it was,” he said.

His home, he said in response to Lansing’s questions, was a “very unpredictable place” where there was “not a lot of normal communication.”

Instead, he said, the brothers learned to read their parents’ subtle cues.

Lansing asked: “Based on all the things you learned about your parents in your life, in terms of their behavior, when you saw the things they were doing in that last week, did you believe that they were going to kill you?”

Nodding his head up and down, Lyle Menendez said: “We believed that they were.”