David Conn, 56; prosecutor won convictions in Menendez case

David Conn, the former prosecutor whose successful retrying of the Erik and Lyle Menendez murder case in 1996 won accolades and then an abrupt demotion, has died. He was 56.

Conn died Tuesday at his Dana Point home five months after being diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease, said his wife of 34 years, Rosemary.

A polished, impeccably dressed New York native whom Time magazine once described as a “Clark Kent type,” Conn went into private practice in 1997 after spending 18 years in the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office.

He left the office after a public falling-out with then-Dist. Atty. Gil Garcetti, whose job Conn had acknowledged he “wouldn’t mind” having some day.

Conn had successfully prosecuted a number of high-profile cases, beginning with the 1985 conviction for cocaine dealing against Dan Haggerty, the TV actor known for playing “Grizzly Adams.” He won convictions in 1988 of serial killer Bill Bradford and in 1990 and 1991 of several people accused in the so-called Cotton Club murder of movie impresario Roy Radin.

“David was one of the most talented prosecutors to serve in this office in recent history,” Dist. Atty. Steve Cooley said Wednesday. “He was a big-case guy ... quite capable of taking on the major cases and handling them as if they were routine.”

Leslie Abramson, the well-known defense attorney who faced Conn in the Menendez retrial, said: “As a prosecutor he was incredibly dogged, totally without mercy.”

The Menendez case posed the stiffest challenge of Conn’s career.

On the first go-round, the case had ended in hung juries in 1994 after the defense portrayed the brothers -- who had admitted to the grisly 1989 shooting deaths of their wealthy parents, Jose and Kitty -- as long-suffering victims of sexual and other abuse by the father. The defense argued that the brothers had killed their parents out of the same rage that drove some battered women to murder abusive spouses.

The original prosecution team never seriously attacked the abuse defense. Conn took the opposite approach, focusing most of the prosecution’s energy on belittling it, while emphasizing the premeditated nature of the crimes and the horrendous injuries the brothers inflicted on their parents.

The son of a factory worker and a homemaker, Conn was born and raised in New York City. At 17 he dropped out of his Catholic high school and joined the Marines, which sent him to Vietnam, where he fixed radar equipment. He told The Times years later that he was disappointed that he never experienced combat.

After completing his military service, he went to Hunter College and Columbia University law school on the GI Bill. Then he moved to Los Angeles, where he was interviewed for a job with the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office by Johnnie L. Cochran Jr., who later would gain international fame as chief defense attorney for O.J. Simpson. Conn would have a brief involvement with the Simpson case during its grand jury phase.

Until he joined the Menendez case, Conn was best known for his success on the Cotton Club murder case. Radin, a producer, had been shot to death in 1983, and his body was found in a remote canyon. Before he was killed, he had been in negotiations for the movie “The Cotton Club,” about the famous Prohibition-era Harlem nightclub. The trial had Hollywood abuzz, with celebrity witnesses including then-Paramount Studios chief Robert Evans, and ended with several convictions.

Conn was acting head of the major crimes unit in the district attorney’s office when he volunteered to lead the second prosecution of the Menendez brothers.

Many of his colleagues thought the case was unwinnable, but Conn began to plot his strategy even before he was officially assigned to the case.

“I recognized in this case they’d put the victims on trial,” he told The Times in 1996. “My key strategy was to see to it that the next trial came to be the trial of Lyle and Erik Menendez, and not the trial of Jose and Kitty Menendez.”

He bombarded the jury with larger-than-life photographs of the murder victims that left no doubts about how brutally they had been slain.

He also ruthlessly attacked the defendants’ assertions that they could not escape their father’s abuse or elicit help from outside the family.

“Blame the victim. Isn’t that what the defense is all about?” Conn asked the jury during his closing argument. The defense “began accusing the victims of physical abuse and sexual abuse. And it finally ended with blaming them for their own deaths.... It’s an abuse excuse, a carefully contrived one, an elaborate one, one filled with details.”

The jury deliberated less than four days before returning guilty verdicts against both brothers for first-degree murder as well as conspiracy to commit murder. They are now serving life sentences.

When he left the courtroom after the verdicts came in, Conn was congratulated by colleagues in an office two floors below the Van Nuys courtroom. Included in the crowd of well-wishers was his boss, Garcetti, who publicly praised Conn as “a man who has really defined excellence through his professional performance.”

The Menendez victory was seen as a particularly crucial win for Garcetti, who was up for reelection and still smarting from his office’s failure to obtain guilty verdicts in the criminal case against Simpson, who was acquitted in 1995 in the deaths of his estranged wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her friend Ronald Goldman.

Six weeks after the Menendez trial, after Conn told a reporter that he “wouldn’t mind” being district attorney one day, he was passed over for a promotion and removed as acting head of his unit. He was transferred to the Norwalk office, a move that was characterized by a Garcetti spokeswoman as a “routine” reassignment. Within the D.A.’s office, however, it was seen as punishment of Conn.

Nine months later, he announced that he was leaving to join the Century City law firm of Jeffer, Mangels, Butler & Marmaro. He spent the last five years in his own practice in West Los Angeles.

“He loved the D.A.’s office. It was a wonderful playground for him. He got to do everything he wanted,” his wife said Wednesday. But once he left, he “never looked back. He loved private practice and the flexibility it gave him.”

In addition to his wife, Conn is survived by two daughters, Jessica and Danielle. Services will be held in New York City. In lieu of flowers, the family suggests donations to the ALS Assn., Greater Los Angeles Chapter, P.O. Box 565, Agoura Hills CA 91376.

elaine.woo@latimes.com