Significance of Menendez Writings Is Ongoing Court Battle

As a Princeton prep school student 13 years ago, Lyle Menendez wrote an essay he called “I Will Change Your Verdict,” about a man soon to be executed for killing a child molester.

“A man awaits his turn on the electric chair. You the average citizens of American put that man there,” wrote Lyle in December, 1982, a month before his 15th birthday. “Now you can taste his death. You hope it hurts and is slow. . . .”

“Do you know what drove him to do it?”

Equally haunting is a screenplay written by a 17-year-old Erik Menendez a year before the brothers shotgunned their parents to death.

In the screenplay, rich protagonist Hamilton Cromwell slices his parents’ throats with a weapon called a razor wire, then looks through their financial files. He finds a will that leaves him a $157-million fortune and “smiles sadistically.”

Contained in Lyle’s essay and Erik’s screenplay are themes that have played a role in the brothers’ murder trials.

For years, attempts to introduce as evidence their creative writings, as well as a 17-page jailhouse letter from Lyle to Erik, have been the subject of fierce court battles. As a result, no jury has read them. Prosecutors sought to introduce the screenplay, defense attorneys the essay and jailhouse letter.

Deputy Dist. Atty. David Conn argued that the screenplay reflected Erik Menendez’s state of mind before and after the killings. The protagonist killed for financial gain; Erik also benefited financially from the slayings of Jose and Kitty Menendez. And, although Erik Menendez claims to have been traumatized by killing his parents, he continued to work on the screenplay afterward, Conn said.

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The defense dismisses the screenplay as pure fantasy. It was written with a friend, and several drafts were typed by Kitty Menendez, defense attorneys point out.

“This was no prediction of what was to occur,” said Barry Levin, one of Erik’s defense attorneys. “It was just creative writing.” The similarities to what happened a year later in the Menendez mansion are “somewhat coincidental,” he added.

On the other hand, the defense contends that Lyle’s essay corroborates the brothers’ story of abuse. During a hearing outside the jury’s presence, Levin told Superior Court Judge Stanley M. Weisberg that Lyle handed the essay to Erik, then about 12, “and explained to him that he was sorry that there wasn’t more he could do, that he couldn’t help him.”

So far, Weisberg has ruled that both the essay and screenplays are irrelevant, either too remote in time or potentially confusing to jurors.

Only the 17-page letter has a chance of becoming evidence, although prosecutor Conn says he will vigorously fight it. The letter is marked as a court exhibit, and the lawyers will argue whether jurors can take it into the jury room when they deliberate.

“We alone know the truth--we alone know the secrets of our family’s past,” Lyle wrote Erik in May 1990, two months after their arrests. The letter was found during a search of the brothers’ jail cells, despite Lyle’s admonishment to his brother: “Please Destroy.”

Erik and Lyle Menendez are charged with premeditated murder in the Aug. 20, 1989 slayings of their wealthy parents, Jose and Kitty Menendez, a powerful entertainment executive and a former small-town beauty queen. If convicted of first-degree murder, they could face the death penalty.

They admit that they killed their parents. The dispute at the trial is over why.

Prosecutors allege that the brothers, 18 and 21 at the time, killed to rid themselves of strict parents who pushed them to excel and controlled the strings to a $14-million purse. They point to evidence that, after the slayings, the brothers searched the family’s home computer for a will, much as Hamilton Cromwell thumbed through his parents’ financial records in Erik’s 1988 screenplay. They spent upward of $1 million during the seven months before their arrests.

The defense says the brothers were abused children who killed out of profound fear that they would die for exposing the family’s dirty secrets of cruelty and incest.

The first trial, which aired the defense allegations of child abuse and molestation behind the gates of mansions from Princeton, N.J., to Beverly Hills, ended in a mistrial two years ago when jurors could not decide whether the crime was murder or manslaughter. The retrial enters its 15th week today.

The brothers’ writings are chilling, even if they are subject to differing spins and interpretations. Parallels can be drawn between the amateurish works of fiction and the facts of a murder case now unfolding in court.

The condemned man in Lyle’s essay, which has never been made public, killed a child molester to protect his 11-year-old son. Defense attorneys say the essay’s themes support the brother’s story of sexual abuse at the hands of their father. At the time the essay was written, Erik had just turned 12. Lyle showed it to him, Erik testified.

“It showed Lyle’s concern over what he knew about what was happening to his little brother and his dilemma over confronting his father,” Levin said in an interview.

“It’s a rather bizarre essay for a child to conjure up,” Levin added. “My view is it was a drastic cry for help. Unfortunately, no one heard it.”

At first, Lyle, the writer, seems to identify with the condemned man, scolding the readers, “You never even gave him a chance to talk. He wanted to, you know. He only wanted to say a few things. But no, not you. You couldn’t let this thing talk as if he had rights or feelings. You only looked at the evidence, smiled and yelled GUILTY!!!”

Later, he adopts the point of view of the man’s son.

“Because he protected his son you are going to leave his family helpless, his sons will have no father, only confusion and madness. They will cry out for daddy, and there will be no answer. . . .”

Prosecutor Conn was unimpressed by the essay.

“It appears to be a creative writing project on a subject he had an interest in,” he said. “It’s not significant in any way to this trial. I don’t find it to be very revealing of him or significant in any way to the issues of this case.”

But the screenplay, the prosecutor believes, contains evidence of two murders foretold.

The Cromwell parents are in bed when their son slices their throats with a razor rope. “Their faces are of questioning horror,” Erik Menendez wrote. With his father’s corpse at his feet, Hamilton Cromwell reads the family will by candlelight, his lips forming “a sadistic smile” upon seeing these words:

“To my beloved son Hamilton, a son I have respected and felt proud to father, I bestow the Cromwell estate, and the money in my Swiss account . . . $157 million dollars.”

In one draft, Hamilton kills his father first. His mother’s murder takes longer and is messier--just as the slayings of Jose and Kitty Menendez played out a year later. He chases her through the house and onto the lawn, carrying his razor rope. As he kills her she cries out, “Noooooooo.” He turns the body over and looks into her pale face.

Hamilton speaks at his father’s memorial service. The man he describes sounds very much like Jose Menendez, as portrayed by the defense during the two murder trials:

“My father was not a man to show his emotions,” Hamilton says. “I can only hope that he loved me as much as he loved all of you. Sometimes he would tell me that I was not worthy to be his son . . . (Tears well up in Hamilton’s eyes.) Nothing I have ever done was good enough for this man and I never heard those words.”

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Later, confronted by a friend, Hamilton confesses to killing his parents, indicating that it was all a youthful mistake: “That was ten years ago . . . I was a teenager. I didn’t understand. I thought they hated me. . . . “

The 17-page letter was written after the killings but long before the brothers’ abuse defense became public. Defense attorneys now seek to use it to disprove prosecutors’ allegations that Erik and Lyle Menendez fabricated their defense and are lying about the molestation.

Prosecutor Conn dismisses the letter as “a self-serving statement.”

In the letter, Lyle writes about his reluctance to testify about the abuse, but leaves the final decision to Erik.

“If it were not for you I doubt I would even try for manslaughter,” he writes. “I would rather try to escape or die. I struggle with my belief that men take responsibility for their actions, pleading abuse is not taking responsibility.”

He vows he’ll never desert Erik, and urges them to stick together.

“We alone can get ourselves through this life after all that has happened.”

Later, he invokes his father’s memory: “I think if Dad could give us one piece of advice as we left the house that night in August, it would be never to abandon each other no matter the circumstance. Never turn against the other no matter the pressure.”

He writes that killing their parents might have been a mistake--a major defense theme.

“What we did in August was a mistake [from] what I can tell and I don’t know what to do about it. What can I do? Nothing I guess.”

He urges his brother to keep fighting.

“I honestly do not believe that I am far way from packing up my bags and calling it a life. . . . I do not see things in terms of manslaughter and life terms. I see only win, lose--honor and dishonor. I refuse to give up for Dad’s sake, he is watching and I will not disappoint him a second time, or Mom, by giving up and having their deaths be in vain.”