Menendezes Given Consecutive Terms

As their six-year legal drama drew to a subdued climax Tuesday, Lyle and Erik Menendez were sentenced to consecutive life terms in state prison without the possibility of parole for the shotgun murders of their wealthy parents.

Superior Court Judge Stanley M. Weisberg told a crowded courtroom that he believed the brothers carefully contemplated killing each parent, and that the crimes should be punished with separate sentences for the murders of their mother and their father.

“It’s quite clear the defendants considered killing each parent separately,” Weisberg said. “This was a decision made over several days. They considered killing one parent, or both, and decided on both and followed that decision.”

The consecutive sentences all but eliminated any hope that they will ever again live outside prison walls.

As deputies escorted him from the courtroom, Lyle Menendez, 28, turned and waved to his former defense attorney, Jill Lansing, and his fiancee, Anna Eriksson. Earlier, he had smiled and winked at Eriksson, whom he unsuccessfully tried to marry on the eve of his sentencing. Court and jail officials refused to allow the wedding.

Erik Menendez, 25, seemed relieved that his days in court had ended. His lawyer, Leslie H. Abramson, said he hopes to study psychology and perhaps help abuse victims.

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The brothers could remain in Los Angeles for as long as another week, a sheriff’s spokesman said. Then, state corrections officials said, they probably will head to North Kern State Prison in Delano, where they will be evaluated and tested for four to six weeks.

“They will be treated like any other killers,” J.P. Tremblay, a prison system administrator, said at a news conference prison officials held in downtown Los Angeles to discuss what will happen to the brothers. Tremblay would not speculate on whether the brothers eventually would be sent to the same prison or whether they would be placed in protective custody.

As for Lyle’s wedding plans, Tremblay said, he could get married in state prison, but since he is serving a life sentence he can never have conjugal or unsupervised overnight visits with his wife.

The sentencing hearing provided an emotionally flat denouement to a courtroom saga that some have called an American tragedy and others, at times, had labeled a legal travesty.

The shotgun slayings of Jose and Kitty Menendez on the evening of Aug. 20, 1989, began as a mystery laced with organized crime overtones, and evolved into a psychological drama after the brothers confessed to a Beverly Hills psychologist.

Emotions erupted Tuesday as spectators filed out of Weisberg’s fourth-floor courtroom in Van Nuys for what may have been the last time in the case.

Teresita Baralt, an aunt who had stood by Lyle and Erik since the murders, sobbed inconsolably in the corridor, comforted by Les Zoeller, the Beverly Hills police detective who investigated her nephews for nearly seven years.

Eriksson, who had hoped to marry Lyle on Monday, also was teary-eyed. She would not speak with reporters.

More than a dozen of the brothers’ family members and supporters, along with defense attorney Abramson, had asked that Lyle and Erik be sent to the same prison--a request the brothers also made on national television during an interview with Barbara Walters on Friday night.

Each brother’s probation report, both of which were released Tuesday, contained an inch-thick stack of letters from supporters.

“No one needs to be protected from Lyle and Erik Menendez,” wrote Eriksson, a 30-year-old record company contracts administrator who met Lyle through the mail long after his 1990 arrest. “We are all very concerned about the dangers they will face if they are sent to a typical prison environment,” she said. “Lyle tries to shield me from how he is treated, but I have heard the way the inmates taunt him, and I am terrified for his safety.”

She also said that “aside from the crime in 1989,” Lyle had not been involved in any altercations “except for childhood snowball fights.”

Both Lyle and Erik expressed remorse to Deputy Probation Officer Gary McMillen, who wrote of each: “It is clear that he committed a horrendous act of violence against the people to whom he owed his life and his lifestyle.” The brothers also told McMillen they visited their parents’ graves in New Jersey to “talk to them about what happened.”

But the prosecutor in the case said the brothers continue to be motivated by self-interest.

Deputy Dist. Atty. David P. Conn, who won first-degree murder convictions against the pair, said their television appearance and publicized attempts to stage a wedding showed that the Menendez brothers were still pressing for an advantage “right up to the end.”

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The brothers, he said, “were continuing to jockey for advantage. Even by going on Barbara Walters, they were trying to get something from the system. You still see a tremendous amount of manipulation on their part.”

Defense attorney Abramson, who had become close to the brothers and often was described as a surrogate mother to Erik, said her role as a lawyer in the case has ended. However, she added, “it’ll never be over for me because I will never sever my ties to Erik Menendez or Lyle Menendez or their family. We are an extended family now.”

The brothers claimed they killed their parents in a panic, convinced they were about to be killed after years of mental and sexual torture. After two juries deadlocked, sparking heated debate over child abuse and personal responsibility, the stage was set for the more gruesome retrial, which placed a heavier emphasis on the crime scene.

During the second trial, prosecutors alleged that the stories of sex abuse were fabricated under a “country club abuse excuse.”

In the probation report, those sentiments are echoed by Brian Andersen, older brother of Kitty Menendez. “I view the abuse defense as one of the biggest lies to be told to the American people,” Andersen said.

In March, a single jury convicted the brothers of two counts each of first-degree murder, and a month later spared them from the death penalty, agreeing instead on a verdict of life in prison without the possibility of parole.

Four jurors from the second trial attended the sentencing, as well as two from the first trials. Several jurors from the first trials, who later befriended the brothers, wrote letters to the court attesting to their good character and urging that they be incarcerated together.

In a letter to Weisberg, Judy Kaplan Zamos, an alternate juror in Lyle Menendez’s first trial, wrote that she has kept in touch with Erik. “The violent crime that he committed was an aberration,” she wrote. “I fear that Erik will be victimized in prison far beyond what a civilized society should intend.”

But Andrew Wolfberg, 26, a juror at the retrial, said in an interview outside the courthouse that while consecutive life sentences were difficult for him to imagine, “I don’t really feel badly for them. I’m confident we did the right thing and I can live with it.”

Times correspondent Michael Krikorian contributed to this story.