Menendez Confession Recounted : Trial: Lyle’s ex-fiancee tells of jailhouse admission that he killed his parents because of sexual abuse.

The former fiancee of Lyle Menendez testified Wednesday that he told her his father and mother were killed by the mob--then later confessed in jail that he had killed them because his mother sexually abused him and because his father abused his brother.

Jamie Pisarcik, a former tennis pro who spent four years in an on-and-off relationship with Lyle, also testified that the elder Menendez brother tried to bribe her to testify falsely at his first murder trial.

While she did not offer an opinion on the mob theory, Pisarcik testified that she adamantly told Lyle she did not believe his tale of sexual abuse.

Pisarcik, a petite woman with short, strawberry-blond hair, looked away from the man she once wanted to marry as she testified in Van Nuys Superior Court. While she was not a newcomer to the Menendez proceedings, her testimony in the retrial of Lyle and Erik Menendez is being cast in a sharply different light from the first trial.

The brothers are accused of murder in the Aug. 20, 1989, shotgun slayings of their parents, Jose and Kitty Menendez, at the family’s Beverly Hills mansion. Their first trial ended last year with juries for each brother deadlocked between murder and lesser manslaughter convictions.

At the first trial, Pisarcik did not testify until after the brothers had testified dramatically about the abuse they allegedly suffered at the hands of their parents. Even then, prosecutors called her to rebut a relatively minor defense point--the brothers’ story that Erik did not know Lyle wore a toupee. Her potentially powerful testimony about Lyle’s jailhouse confession played out as a footnote.

But at the retrial, before a single jury, Deputy Dist. Atty. Carol J. Najera called Pisarcik during the heart of the prosecution’s case, attempting to bolster allegations that the brothers fabricated their defense. The prosecution is working harder in the retrial to undermine the defense’s so-called “abuse excuse.”

So, while there was no talk Wednesday of toupees, there was plenty of testimony about Pisarcik’s tumultuous relationship with Lyle, his heavy spending after his parents’ slayings and his fictitious tales of murderous mobsters.

The brothers admit that they killed their parents, but claim they did so out of fear that their own lives were in danger after they threatened to expose incestuous family secrets. Judge Stanley M. Weisberg ordered the jury to consider Pisarcik’s testimony in connection with Lyle Menendez only.

Pisarcik said she had broken off her relationship with Lyle, but renewed it because he needed help “getting his life back together.” She said he initially had speculated that the killings were Mafia-related. Even after his arrest in March, 1990, Pisarcik said she believed “100% in his innocence” and visited him daily in jail.

But in December, 1990, Lyle proposed that she help his defense by suggesting that Jose Menendez had made sexual advances toward her.

Lyle promised that “a large sum of money would be deposited in my bank account,” she said.

A few weeks later, her suspicions about her fiance were confirmed when Lyle tearfully confessed the killings to her during a visit at the county jail, Pisarcik said. He held a letter up against the glass partition that separated them, she said. In the letter, Lyle apologized for lying to her and said “it was because his mother had sexually abused him and Erik was abused by his father,” Pisarcik testified.

“I was crying and saying, ‘Why? Why? Why?’ ” she recounted. Later, she told the jury, “I asked him, ‘Why did you do this? How in the world could you kill your parents? . . . Why didn’t you just run away if it was so bad?’

“He said he tried to, but Erik didn’t want to.”