A Los Angeles video entertainment executive who once headed RCA/Ariola records as well as U.S. operations for the Hertz Corp. was found shot to death along with his wife in their Beverly Hills mansion, authorities said Monday.
The eldest son of slain entertainment executive Jose Menendez and his wife was arrested Thursday on suspicion of murdering his parents last August in their Beverly Hills mansion.
Two Beverly Hills brothers allegedly confessed to their psychologist that they murdered their multimillionaire parents two months earlier “out of hatred and out of a desire to be free from their father’s domination,” according to tape recordings detailed Thursday in a state appellate court ruling.
Lyle and Erik Menendez killed their parents, then confessed to a therapist that they were driven by hatred and the desire to be free from their father’s “domination and impossible standards,” prosecutors said as the Beverly Hills brothers went on trial Tuesday for murder.
The Menendez murder case ended Friday without a single verdict as a second jury was declared deadlocked, the jurors hopelessly polarized over whether Lyle and Erik Menendez were coldblooded killers or long-suffering victims of abuse within their family’s gated Beverly Hills estate.
In an apparent repudiation of the abuse defense, a jury on Wednesday convicted Erik and Lyle Menendez of first-degree murder for the 1989 slayings of their parents, setting the stage for dramatic weeks of testimony as the brothers fight to escape the death penalty.
