Menendez Brothers Feared Being Killed, Attorney Says

Jose and Kitty Menendez secretly spied on their sons, even taping their telephone calls, which made them seem all-knowing and all-powerful to their college-age sons, an attorney for Lyle Menendez told a jury Thursday.

Lyle and Erik Menendez believed there was no escape from parents who abused them and controlled every aspect of their lives, Deputy Public Defender Charles A. Gessler said in his opening statements.

Gessler said the brothers “both wondered, ‘How do Mom and Dad know everything we do?’ They talked seriously about whether their mother was a witch because she knew everything they did.” Finally, when Lyle Menendez learned that his father had been molesting younger brother Erik for 12 years, the disclosure touched off an escalating family crisis that culminated in the 1989 shotgun slayings of the parents, Gessler said.

Lyle Menendez, 27, and Erik Menendez, 24, have admitted they killed their parents, but contend their crime was manslaughter, not murder. The reason: The sons were certain their parents would kill them rather than risk public airing of the family’s dirty linen, Gessler said.

When, on a Sunday night in August, the parents argued with Lyle and Erik, then went into the den of their Beverly Hills mansion and closed the doors, the brothers turned to each other and Lyle said: “It’s happening. They’re going to kill us,” Gessler said.

“And that’s when they went and frantically loaded the shotguns and came back into the room,” Gessler said.

Lyle Menendez believed his wealthy parents were armed and ready to kill him when the two burst into the den of the family’s Beverly Hills mansion and blasted away with shotguns, his attorney told the jury in Van Nuys.

It was only when they returned to the den and turned on the lights to pick up shotgun shells that the brothers “realized their tragic mistake,” Gessler said. “And then they lost it. Lyle and Erik Menendez lost it,” the defense attorney said.

“With this mistake came tremendous grief, tremendous remorse,” Gessler said. “Lyle and Erik didn’t know their parents didn’t have guns until after they killed them.”

The tennis-playing brothers--Lyle was attending Princeton at the time, Erik was headed to UCLA--are accused of murdering their parents, hard-driving entertainment executive Jose Enrique Menendez, 45, and former small-town beauty queen Mary Louise Menendez, 47, whom everyone called Kitty.

Deputy Dist. Atty. David P. Conn is alleging that the brothers killed to rid themselves of parents who controlled the purse strings of the family fortune, and had threatened to disinherit them.

But Gessler said his client believed he was already disinherited, and was much better off with his parents alive. “Lyle Menendez never had it so good from a material standpoint,” Gessler said.

The day’s dramatic highlight came in the afternoon, when Conn played a crime scene video of the Beverly Hills mansion. The courtroom was hushed, and the Menendezes’ friends and family members watched intently while Beverly Hills Police Detective Les Zoeller narrated the video.

Less than a week after defense attorneys succeeded in barring television cameras from the courtroom, defense attorney Leslie H. Abramson asked Superior Court Judge Stanley M. Weisberg to issue a gag order.

She asked that attorneys and parties in the case be ordered not to talk to television reporters, saying she feared prosecutors were using the media to apply their spin to the case in news reports that might be viewed by the unsequestered jurors.

“There’s Mr. Conn with his talking head, and there’s me with my little talking head trying to set the record straight. I’d just as soon not see these talking heads,” said Abramson, who was a fixture as a legal commentator during the O.J. Simpson trial.

Weisberg deferred ruling on the request, saying he would consider it if defense attorneys file a written request.