Erik Menendez Adds Details to Testimony : Trial: After telling his lawyer he had only a vague memory of killing his parents, he recalls more under grilling by prosecutor. He remembers shooting mostly at his mother.

Under a crackling cross-examination, Erik Menendez abruptly remembered vivid details about killing his parents, testifying Thursday that he and his brother emptied their shotguns and that he was “mostly shooting at my mom.”

Responding to a prosecutor’s rapid-fire questions just two days after telling his own lawyer, “I just remember firing,” Erik Menendez said he also remembered his mother’s haunting moans after the first barrage failed to kill her in the TV room of the family’s Beverly Hills mansion.

He said he ran out to his car and that Lyle Menendez, his older brother, arrived seconds later. No words were spoken, Erik Menendez said, as he gave his brother one more shell. He said he knew instinctively that it was for his mother.

And he said, “I didn’t think we’d get away with it--from the second it was done.”

Erik Menendez, 22, and Lyle Menendez, 25, are charged with first-degree murder on the night of Aug. 20, 1989. Prosecutors, who are seeking the death penalty, contend that they killed out of hatred and greed. The defense says they killed in fear after a lifetime of physical, mental and sexual abuse.

Spectators, anticipating that cross-examination of Erik Menendez would begin Thursday, showed intensified interest in the trial, even beyond the feverish level of the past weeks.

Hoping for one of the few public seats in the tiny, wood-paneled courtroom, they began camping out at the front door of the Van Nuys Superior Court at 2 a.m.

When Erik Menendez first testified about the killing scene Tuesday, he told his lawyer, Leslie Abramson, that he recalled only vague details--for instance, that the room was smoky. “It was horrible,” he said Tuesday.

From the start of cross-examination, Deputy Dist. Atty. Lester Kuriyama set out to document the horror.

Kuriyama began: “Now you surprised your parents while they were watching television and blasted them until your pump shotguns were empty of ammunition, correct?”

“No, sir,” Erik Menendez said. His parents were not watching TV, he said, though the set was on.

On Tuesday, Erik Menendez said he was not sure “where was this, where was that.” But he told Kuriyama on Thursday that he recalled his parents were standing, an assertion that would help refute the prosecution’s charge that the brothers killed while “lying in wait.”

He also recalled where they were standing, between the coffee table and the couch.

He said, “I shot everything I had.”

Then, he said, he heard a sound from his mother, on the floor. Kuriyama asked him to describe it. “I guess I would call it a moaning because she was dying,” he said.

The sound, he said, “freaked me out,” and he ran to his car.

“You were so freaked out that you went to your car and you had ammunition in a box and you handed that ammunition to your brother?” Kuriyama asked.

Erik Menendez said he was “scrambling around for shells,” and handed one to his brother. “I knew he was going back into the room,” he said, “I knew what was going to happen.”

“You just instinctively knew your brother was going to return, to finish killing your mother?” Kuriyama asked.

“Yes,” he said.

When the shooting ended, Jose Menendez had been hit six times, Kitty Menendez 10 times. Though the number of shots fired remains unclear, Kuriyama suggested that the brothers had been “deadly accurate” despite the dim light.

“Mr. Menendez,” he said, “there were only two shots that missed.”

“Apparently,” Erik Menendez said.

Earlier Thursday, before Kuriyama began his cross-examination, the younger Menendez brother told Abramson he remembered another detail. He said he had told Beverly Hills psychologist L. Jerome Oziel that Jose Menendez said, “No!” when the brothers burst into the room.

Testifying that his father had spoken in a “very rough, demanding tone,” Erik Menendez said he believed Jose Menendez was “ordering us to stop firing.”

Though he has spoken often of his father as a hypocritical tyrant, Erik Menendez said his memory of both his parents grew fonder after he killed them. That was one reason he did not tell Oziel that his father had molested him, he said, even when he confided the slayings to the psychologist on Oct. 31, 1989.

“I was just much too ashamed to deal with it,” he said. “I wanted to keep it as secret as possible, bury it, throw it in the ocean, make it disappear,” he said.

“I thought they were great people I had killed, and I didn’t understand very much. I loved them more than I had ever loved them at that point.”

Menendez conceded that he had lied to police, friends, relatives and the press about his role in the slayings.

Erik Menendez said others were liars, as well.

He named Oziel, who as the prosecution’s chief witness said the brothers sought to commit the “perfect crime.” Erik Menendez said they told him no such thing.

And when Oziel testified, he got the sequence of what the brothers did after they killed their parents “all jumbled up and mixed up,” Erik Menendez said Thursday. Oziel did not even mention that the brothers went to a movie theater to buy tickets as part of an alibi, he noted.

Erik Menendez said another prosecution witness, his onetime best friend, Craig Cignarelli, also lied on the stand.

Cignarelli testified that Erik Menendez admitted the slayings to him on Sept. 1, 1989, at the Beverly Hills house. Erik Menendez said another friend, Casey Whalen, was there that day, not Cignarelli.

Craig Cignarelli was at the house on Sept. 7 or 8, 1989, Erik Menendez said. On that day, he said, he told his friend three different versions of the slayings: that someone his parents had known had killed them, that he had done it and, finally, that he had not done it.

When he hinted that he might have done it, he said, he had hoped Cignarelli would reassure him, “No you’re too good a person to have done it.”