Abuse ‘Rewired’ Menendez’s Brain, Expert Testifies : Courts: Accused killer acted as if he were on autopilot on the night he and his older brother killed their parents, a professor for the defense says.

A defense expert testified Tuesday that Erik Menendez suffered prolonged sexual abuse, and that it led him to instinctively commit homicide to protect himself.

Under defense questioning in her third day of testimony, Ann Burgess, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, said Erik Menendez endured a classic pattern of molestation by his father: seduced as a little boy, then dominated and used for sex as an adolescent.

By age 18, traumatized severely by 12 years of abuse, Erik Menendez was racked by overriding feelings of powerlessness, hopelessness, helplessness and fear--and, she said, the belief that a parent with a penchant for violence could and would kill him to keep the molestation secret.

That fear had “rewired” his brain, leaving Erik Menendez highly sensitive to imminent violence, Burgess said. And so, she said, when he and his brother sensed violence on the night of Aug. 20, 1989, it was as if he was on autopilot when they blasted away at their parents.

“These are automatic behaviors that spring into action,” Burgess said.

Erik Menendez, 22, and Lyle Menendez, 25, are charged with first-degree murder in the shotgun slayings of their parents, Jose Menendez, 45, and Kitty Menendez, 47. The sons shot the parents in the TV room 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 brothers admit the killings but contend that they lashed out in fear and self-defense after years of physical, psychological and sexual abuse.

Erik Menendez testified that his father molested him for 12 years, from the age of 6 to 18. Prosecutors contend that the abuse is fiction.

Burgess, a professor of psychiatric mental health nursing who has done extensive research on abused children, testified Tuesday she was without a doubt that Erik Menendez was telling the truth about the abuse.

She arrived at that opinion, she said, after interviewing Erik Menendez for about 50 hours and reading reams of reports and testimony.

Van Nuys Superior Court Judge Stanley M. Weisberg warned jurors not to accept Burgess’ testimony as gospel, noting that her opinion was based on material provided to her by defense lawyers.

Burgess, under questioning by defense attorney Leslie Abramson, said the graphic details of Erik Menendez’s story convinced her that he was telling the truth. For example, she said, he testified that he used to put cinnamon in his father’s coffee and oatmeal, hoping to make oral sex more palatable. In her interviews with him, conducted the last several years while he was in jail, Erik Menendez had his own “special way” of describing the abuse, Burgess said.

Just as he did when he was testifying in court, Erik Menendez gave oral sex the label “knees,” for the posture he had to assume, Burgess said. Child abuse victims typically use their own “special language,” Burgess said.

In addition, she said, Erik Menendez testified that to this day he remains bedeviled by a recurring nightmare. It includes a cow, a horse and a green face, which get larger while he gets smaller; meanwhile, the green face turns into his father, which chases him “through this darkness.”

Recurring nightmares, Burgess said, are a sign of traumatizing abuse.

Retracing the testimony that both brothers offered--that they were in increasing fear for their lives after Lyle Menendez threatened Aug. 17, 1989, to expose the father as a child molester--Burgess said the fear seems genuine.

It is very common, she said, for abused children to feel precisely the way Erik Menendez said he felt just before killing his parents: without any adult to trust, with no place to go and seemingly out of options--a combination that produces intense fear.

When, on the night of the killings, the parents and sons got into an argument in the mansion foyer and the parents closed the door to the TV room, Erik Menendez viewed that action as a sign of imminent danger, Burgess said.

An outsider might not view the closing of the door that way, she said. But Erik Menendez was “hyper-vigilant” after years of abuse, his brain biologically altered to be attuned to cues that outsiders would ignore, she said.

From then on and until the parents were killed, Burgess said, Erik Menendez was reacting in fear to the “flight or fight” signals in his brain. When he retrieved his shotgun, went outside and loaded, dashed back inside and fired, all of it was done automatically, without conscious thought, Burgess said.

Prosecutors are due to cross-examine Burgess today.