Passion Returns, Crowd Doesn’t in Menendez Retrial : Courts: Leaner, meaner proceeding opens with prosecution saying money was motive, defense describing ‘mind-numbing’ fear.

Within 24 hours of shotgunning their millionaire parents to death, Erik and Lyle Menendez “were carrying their dead parents’ safe to the home of . . . a probate attorney,” a prosecutor alleged Wednesday as the Beverly Hills brothers’ retrial began.

“The defendants stood to inherit their family’s fortune,” Deputy Dist. Atty. David P. Conn said. “They were trying to get their hands on their parents’ money.”

But a defense attorney ridiculed the idea that a desire for money was behind the slayings.

Leslie Abramson, lawyer for younger brother Erik, told the jury that the two men killed out of “mind-numbing, adrenaline-pumping fear” that their parents would kill them first for threatening to expose a highly dysfunctional family’s secrets.

When her client told Lyle days before the slaying that their father had been molesting him for 12 years, “he told the most shameful of family secrets--the incest secret.”

So began a leaner, meaner trial in a case of parricide sprung from behind the veneer of privilege.

The brothers are accused of murdering their parents, hard-driving entertainment executive Jose Menendez, 45, and former small-town beauty queen Mary Louise Menendez, 47.

The second trial will involve heavier emphasis on what a shotgun round can do to human flesh, and what members of a dysfunctional family can do to one another.

And it will include the prosecution’s allegations that the brothers “tricked” jurors two years ago by “fabricating” evidence during their first trial, which ended in January, 1994, with two juries deadlocked between murder and manslaughter convictions. In deciding the issue, the current jurors will be asked to focus on the brothers’ states of mind at the precise moment they admittedly emptied two pump-action Mossberg shotguns into their parents, who Conn said were ambushed.

This time, as the seven men and five women on the jury are led behind the walls of a Beverly Hills mansion, they will be asked to linger over the bloody crime scene left six years ago in the family room.

They will hear from the defense about a family so dysfunctional that everyone locked their bedroom doors by habit.

“These parents, in raising these children, ringed them in a fortress of terror and deprivation,” Abramson said. “They controlled their sons by fear. The fear they so carefully instilled in their sons caused their own demise.”

The defense, arguing that the brothers had an irrational fear that their lives were in danger, is seeking manslaughter convictions under a legal concept known as the “imperfect self-defense.”

Abramson said the lights were out when Erik and Lyle Menendez walked into the family room, carrying shotguns, after an argument with their parents. Erik saw a shadowy figure in the blue haze of the television set, she said, and the image flashed him back to his father’s shadow haunting his door each time he had been molested as a child.

He fired randomly, in a blind panic, she said.

Lyle’s lead attorney, Charles A. Gessler, won’t get the chance to give his client’s side of the story until today.

Prosecutors are seeking first-degree murder convictions and the death penalty, and say the crime scene holds the clues to cold-blooded murder.

The brothers, Conn said, “burst into the room with shotguns and began shooting their parents to death. . . . Hundreds of shotgun pellets tore into the bodies of Kitty and Jose Menendez. We will show that they were ambushed in a storm of gunfire.”

Prosecutors allege that the sons, then ages 18 and 21, were ridding themselves of controlling parents who held a tight grip on the strings of a $14-million purse.

As Conn walked blowups of gory crime scene photos past the jurors, the brothers averted their eyes. Erik Menendez, now 24, gazed blankly at the defense table. Lyle Menendez, 27, rested his chin in his left hand and looked downward.

Prosecutors plan to play a crime scene video today.

Neither brother seemed to react when Conn accused them of shotgunning their parents in the legs to make the slayings look like an organized crime hit. The sons suggested to police that there might be a connection between the slayings and their father’s business dealings with “shady characters,” Conn said.

Although Beverly Hills police briefly investigated a possible organized crime link, the brothers eventually confessed.

But on the night of the slayings--Aug. 20, 1989--the two cried and lied so convincingly to police that they weren’t even suspected, Conn said.

“No sooner were the defendants released by police than they spent the day thinking and working toward their goal of getting their hands on the parents’ money,” he said.

At 3:30 p.m. the day after the shootings, the brothers asked family friend Claire Wright, who had come to the house to pick up a tennis racket, if her attorney husband, Randy, handled wills and probate cases, Conn said.

They carried a safe, which they believed might contain a will, and opened it in Wright’s garage, Conn said, despite the attorney’s admonition that the safe should be opened only in the presence of the executor and other relatives.

The reason, according to the prosecutor: The sons feared that Jose Menendez already had cut them from his will, as he had threatened.

Conn steered away from the previous prosecution team’s emphasis on motive, telling jurors that prosecutors didn’t have to prove a motive to show the brothers killed deliberately and after weighing their actions.

The motive, Conn said, was “financial independence.” Just before killing his parents, each brother received a monthly allowance of $180, the prosecutor said.

Lyle Menendez, he said, spent $1 million between Aug. 20, 1989, and his arrest on March 8, 1990. Both brothers were involved in million-dollar real estate deals.