Lyle Menendez’s Murder Case Goes to Jury : Trial: Prosecution finishes closing statement, belittling brothers’ claims of sexual abuse. Deliberations to begin Monday.

The first of the Menendez brothers’ murder cases went to the jury Friday with a prosecutor berating Lyle and Erik Menendez as “spoiled, vicious brats” who killed their parents, then put on the “best defense daddy’s money could buy.”

Sarcastic and indignant, Deputy Dist. Atty. Pamela Bozanich belittled the brothers’ assertion that they killed in fear after years of sexual abuse, calling the defense a concocted plea for jurors’ sympathy.

Bozanich ended her closing statement by revealing that her own father had been beaten and abused as a child. But instead of killing, she said, he ran away from home to the Navy and a productive life. “For all those children who were severely abused and who became useful members of society, this defense is an offense,” she said in the argument that wrapped up five months of trial.

Two juries are hearing the case, one for each brother, and Van Nuys Superior Court Judge Stanley M. Weisberg sent the case to the Lyle Menendez jury Friday afternoon after instructing the panel in the relevant law. Closing arguments for Erik Menendez are set to begin Monday.

Lyle Menendez’s jury has seven women and five men, most of them from blue-collar households. Even before they could begin reviewing the stacks of evidence, they had to select a foreman late Friday.

They will not deliberate over the weekend and are not being sequestered.

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Outside court Friday, both the prosecution and the defense said they are hopeful.

“We said from the very beginning the only issue was going to be why this crime occurred,” said Jill Lansing, the lead attorney for Lyle Menendez. “Our explanation in the very beginning was fear and our explanation in the very end was fear.”

She said the prosecution case, in contrast, “kept shifting--first it was greed, then it was hate, then it was control, then it was revenge.”

“They didn’t seem to have a very clear idea of what their case was going to be,” Lansing said. “And I think in the end the most logical explanation for what happened was fear.”

Lansing concluded her closing argument before jurors Thursday. Only Bozanich spoke to jurors Friday, delivering the prosecution’s rebuttal.

Speaking outside court, Bozanich said of Jose and Kitty Menendez: “I hope (jurors) will be left with the fact that these people were slaughtered in the prime of their life for no reason other than perhaps they were bad parents.”

Earlier, she urged jurors to convict Lyle Menendez of first-degree murder in the Aug. 20, 1989, slayings, saying the brothers’ tearful tales of being sexually molested were “not real.”

She spent most of her time speaking about Kitty Menendez, asserting that the defense had a much harder time explaining her killing than that of her autocratic husband.

She posted two pictures of Kitty Menendez on a bulletin board--one of her in a pink strapless gown, the other an autopsy shot, showing her face distorted and bloodied from shotgun blasts, with a hole in her left cheek from a final blast that Lyle Menendez testified he fired to stop his mother from “sneaking” away.

“This is the woman who gave birth to them,” Bozanich said. “This is what they did to their mother.”

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Lyle Menendez, 25, and Erik Menendez, 23, admitted during the five-month trial that they killed their wealthy parents, Jose Menendez, 45, and Kitty Menendez, 47.

Weisberg gave jurors four options, ranging from first-degree murder, which could bring the death penalty, to involuntary manslaughter, which carries only two to four years in prison.

Lansing and Michael Burt, Lyle Menendez’s other attorney, urged jurors to vote for the lesser verdict, saying that the brothers had killed in a blind panic, as if on autopilot.

In her closing remarks Friday, Bozanich accused the defense of playing on emotions “in hopes of confusing the issues, in hopes of making you feel sorry.”

She noted that the defense often called the brothers “the boys.”

The defense, she said, also played up the emotional impact of such evidence as the stuffed animal collection that Lyle Menendez had through his teen-age years.

Producing another picture, which showed his Cookie Monster doll, Bozanich referred to a sports car Lyle Menendez bought after the killings and asked: “When (he) bought a $70,000 Porsche, did he take Cookie Monster for a spin?”

It was not the only instance of the prosecution and defense showing jurors the same photos while reading far different meanings in them.

On Thursday, Lansing produced childhood pictures that showed the naked brothers from the waist down, arguing that Jose Menendez took them. It was perhaps the strongest piece of evidence to bolster the portrait of the father as a pedophile.

On Friday, Bozanich noted that the pictures were on a roll that also included a photo of a dishwasher taken from an odd angle.

“How tall is the person who took these?” the prosecutor asked, quickly suggesting it had to be a very short person--meaning the brothers.

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The most potent evidence that they planned to kill their parents, Bozanich said, was in the tape of a counseling session they had Dec. 11, 1989, with their Beverly Hills psychologist, L. Jerome Oziel.

On the tape, Lyle Menendez says the brothers killed their mother to put her “out of her misery.”

Bozanich told jurors to listen to the tape: “Lyle Menendez in his own voice, coolly, calmly . . . planning to kill his parents.”

She also tried to defend Oziel, who testified for the prosecution that the brothers confessed to him--and was portrayed by the defense as a philandering incompetent. “Dr. Oziel is not the bad guy in this case,” she said. Pointing to Lyle Menendez, she said: “The bad guy is sitting right there.”