Time for Judgment: Lynch or Sam?

It was a trial that had everything --indeed, too much of everything. There was a lanky young heir to a multimillion-dollar fortune as the central figure in a murky kidnaping plot, a desperate defendant charging that the whole caper had been an elaborate fake, and there were allegations about a homosexual liaison carried out in locales ranging from the pool-house of a secluded suburban estate to gay bars in Manhattan.

But as the trial probing the kidnaping of Seagram Liquor Heir Samuel Bronfman II neared an end last week, the case remained almost as mysterious as it was sensational. Since the trial began in October in White Plains, N.Y., the Bronfman jury has had to weigh two conflicting stories about the kidnaping. Sam Bronfman, 23, testified that two men snatched him and later threatened to kill him unless his rich father, Seagram Chairman Edgar Bronfman, paid a $2.3 million ransom.

More Bizarre. But the principal defendant, Mel Patrick Lynch, 38, a New York City fireman, told another, much more bizarre story. Lynch insisted that some time before the supposed abduction he met young Sam in a bar and began a homosexual relationship with him; eventually, says Lynch, Bronfman blackmailed him into joining in a fake kidnaping scheme aimed at extorting money from his father. The second defendant, Dominic Byrne, 54, a limousine-service operator, claimed that Lynch "duped" him into assisting in Bronfman's disappearance.

Who was telling the truth? Bronfman's story had the virtue of being straightforward: the Seagram heir testified that a man he did not know grabbed him on a humid August night last year as he was parking his car at his mother's estate in Purchase, N.Y. Later, his captors sent his father first a ransom letter then tape recordings made by Bronfman relaying impassioned pleas for payment. Eventually, the elder Bronfman took two plastic bags containing $2.3 million in cash to a deserted street in New York City's borough of Queens. A day later, police found Sam in a Brooklyn apartment, bound and gagged and guarded by Lynch.

Do It Again. But the defense raised troubling questions about Bronfman's story. Lynch's lawyer suggested that Sam Bronfman had a motive to plan the hoax: a desire for more money (though he received an annual trust income of $32,000). The lawyer also played one of Bronfman's tapes. He seemed to hint that Bronfman was not really a kidnap victim but just acting the part, because Sam's voice trails off in a final plea to his father--"O.K., Dad, that's it"--only to reappear a moment later saying briskly, "Do it again." Finally, the prosecution's own witnesses, two FBI agents who questioned Byrne after they had found Bronfman, could not agree on what questions they had asked or what Byrne had answered.

The defense had its own problems, including some never-resolved inconsistencies. Neither Lynch nor Byrne fully explained why after their arrest they initially told the FBI that two men accosted them at a Manhattan hotel and forced them to nab Bronfman. Nor did they ever explain why they next gave written confessions to the FBI saying that they spent months scouting the Bronfman estate to plan the grab--without ever mentioning any involvement on Sam Bronfman's part. It would be up to the jury to decide, if indeed it could, whose story to believe, Sam's or the two defendants'.

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