Brother Believable, Expert Says : Trial: Defense witness testifies that Lyle Menendez has been ‘essentially truthful’ about role in parents’ slayings.

Declaring that he had “not been sold a bill of goods,” a defense expert insisted under cross-examination Tuesday that Lyle and Erik Menendez blasted away at their parents in “fear and confusion” after years of abuse.

Time and again, prosecutors asked Jon R. Conte, a professor of social work at the University of Washington, to explain why he believed Lyle Menendez, an admitted liar. But Conte said he was confident that the older Menendez brother has been “essentially truthful” about the abuse he suffered and his role in the killings.

Like three previous defense experts, Conte rejected inconsistencies in the brothers’ testimony as unimportant. He said they killed their parents in the TV room of the family’s Beverly Hills mansion in a “period of great confusion and great anxiety.”

Deputy Dist. Atty. Pamela Bozanich asked him to explain why, immediately after the shootings, the brothers picked up all the shotgun shells to hide incriminating evidence. Was that, she asked, an act of confusion and anxiety?

“People do strange things in traumatic situations,” Conte said. “Ma’am, Jackie Kennedy tried to get on the back of a limousine to get her husband’s skull.”

Bozanich asked if that was really analogous to picking up shotgun shells to hide fingerprints.

“I think it’s analogous to how trauma influences people’s ability to do things,” Conte said.

Lyle Menendez, 25, and Erik Menendez, 22, are charged with first-degree murder in the Aug. 20, 1989, killings of Jose Menendez, 45, and Kitty Menendez, 47.

Conte said he reached the conclusion that the brothers were driven by fear based on 500 hours of research on the case, including 60 hours of interviews with Lyle Menendez.

Prosecutors have sought to undermine the defense experts by reminding jurors how the brothers lied: How Lyle Menendez cried while calling 911 to report the slayings. How he suggested to police that the killings were linked to his father’s business dealings. And how he told a bodyguard--whom he hired about a week later, presumably for his own protection--that the Mafia had done it.

But Conte said: “I find nothing to suggest he was dishonest with me.”

The final defense expert on child abuse, he left the stand in midafternoon, signaling the impending end of the defense case. Defense lawyers say they expect to rest by the end of the week.

With the next witnesses--Kitty Menendez’s sister and former sister-in-law--they had hoped to tell jurors that Kitty Menendez saw abuse in her own childhood, seeking to show a generational pattern.

But Van Nuys Superior Court Judge Stanley M. Weisberg ruled that whatever may have happened to Kitty Menendez in the 1940s had no bearing on the killings. So her sister, Joan VanderMolen, and former sister-in-law, Pat Andersen, told jurors additional anecdotes about the Menendez family, the type of testimony that dominated the first weeks of the defense case.

Once, Andersen said, Jose Menendez cheated in a chess game with her former husband and the men ended up wrestling.