Waiting for the Verdicts

By Jill Smolowe

Prosecutor Pamela Bozanich began her closing argument last Wednesday by tacking a single picture to the courtroom bulletin board. The full-color glossy showed the TV room of the Menendez mansion in Beverly Hills, California, patriarch Jose lifeless on a couch, his wife Kitty in a smashed and bloodied heap on the floor. In blunt language that veered from the schoolmarmish to the sarcastic, Bozanich delivered her message: "Lyle Menendez, accompanied by his brother, planned this murder . . . this was an intentional killing."

The next day defense attorney Jill Lansing also tacked a picture on the board, this one showing the body of a prepubescent Lyle frontally naked from the neck down. She went on to describe a toxic environment where two depraved, vicious parents turned their sons into helpless prisoners and sexual playthings. Lansing recounted testimony of the brothers being punched, belt- whipped and molested by their parents. "You need to decide what was going on in Erik and Lyle Menendez's mind that night," she said, "before you can decide what kind of crime was committed."

L.A. Law could not have presented more dramatic summations, their lines of argument taut and forcefully drawn. Indeed, channel grazers happening past Court TV last week might well have mistaken the proceedings for a staged show, complete with great clothes and great cheekbones. Unlike scripted dramas, however, these closing arguments went on for hours, with attorneys wielding charts and digressing repeatedly to help jurors sort through the 101 witnesses and 401 exhibits paraded concurrently before the brothers' separate juries. It then took Judge Stanley Weisberg more than an hour to issue jury instructions on the subtle variations in mental state that distinguish a first-degree * murder from a second-degree offense, a voluntary manslaughter from an involuntary killing -- all-important gradations that may spell the difference between life and death for Lyle, 25, and Erik, 23, in the Aug. 20, 1989, slaying of their parents.

Weisberg could only hope that after 90 days of hearing about sex, lies and audiotapes, the jurors hadn't missed his most important instruction, one that went largely unstated. At no point did the judge inform Lyle's jury of the conditions that would win acquittal -- nor will he when he addresses Erik's jury this week. Weisberg ruled last week that the brothers Menendez could not argue "perfect self-defense," meaning that they had shot their parents out of a reasonable and honest belief that their own lives were in imminent danger. If the two juries are faithful to Weisberg's instructions, the best either brother can hope for is a finding that they had genuine but unreasonable fears of danger -- and involuntarily slaughtered their parents, a verdict that carries a minimum sentence of two years and a maximum of four.

So much for the fine distinctions of the law, which aims to make a precise science out of the imprecise art of reading a defendant's heart and mind. In the end, the verdicts will hinge largely on the jurors' reactions to the brothers' graphic stories of parental abuse. Did the young men concoct the details to mask their desire to dip freely into their family's $14 million estate -- shrunken by spending binges, attorneys' fees and other costs to $800,000 -- without the interference of their controlling parents? Or were the comfortable years the brothers spent in Princeton, N.J., an elaborate lie, a filial cover-up for the sodomizing and death threats by their parents? And if the jurors believe the tales of abuse, would they then allow the victims of such abuse to plead self-defense and escape the full penalty of the law for using violence on their violators?

"The sexual abuse is here to portray the victims as monsters so you don't care that they are dead," argued prosecutor Bozanich. "But we don't execute people for being bad parents." Bozanich had to deal with the defense's strategy, which in effect put the dead parents on trial for alleged abuses. Indeed, she could no longer argue that the brothers acted out of pure greed. "This was not a classic murder for financial gain," she allowed. "The defendant and his brother wanted to maintain their life the way it was, without their parents controlling them."

Even so, Bozanich cast the details of abuse as cool, calculated lies. She launched this portion of her argument with a reading from Hitler's Mein Kampf: "The great masses of the people . . . will more easily fall victims to a great lie than a small one." Bozanich then recapped the lies Lyle had told in the seven months prior to his arrest -- lies he had to own up to once his trial got under way. He lied to police investigators when he made up the tale of Mafia hit men, even as he had the presence of mind to remove incriminating shells from his car while cops stood by. He lied to his relatives, maintaining his innocence to ensure that his legal fees would be covered with money from his parents' estate. He similarly lied to his girlfriend Jamie Pisarcik, then later urged her to testify falsely that his father had "made a pass" at her.

More than a few of the brothers' stories faltered in the courtroom. Pisarcik, who has since broken up with Lyle, challenged the brothers' contention that the murder plan had begun on Aug. 15, when mother Kitty ripped Lyle's toupee from his head. The scene supposedly so shocked Erik that to assuage his brother's humiliation, the younger Menendez confessed to his sibling that he was being continually abused by their father. Lyle allegedly then began thinking of ways of saving his brother from Jose. Pisarcik testified, however, that Erik couldn't have been shocked by his brother's bald pate because the previous spring Erik had told her that Lyle wore a hairpiece.

The prosecution also punctured the brothers' claim that they had traveled to San Diego to purchase Mossberg pump shotguns only after they tried to buy handguns at a local sports store but were deterred by the 15-day waiting period. In fact, the sports store had not carried handguns since 1986, making the stop unlikely -- and supporting the prosecution's contention that the brothers had deliberately traveled out of town to purchase the weapons where no one would recognize them.

Most damaging was the audiotape of a therapy session the brothers had with Dr. Jerome Oziel on Dec. 11, 1989. On that 61-minute tape, which the defense struggled for three years to suppress, Lyle said they had killed Kitty to put her "out of her misery" over her loveless marriage, making a joint decision that Jose "should be killed" because of "what he's doing to my mother." Hoping to discredit Oziel, defense lawyers offered extensive testimony from / the married therapist's former lover. "The defense proved that Dr. Oziel was a philanderer," Bozanich said. "They did not prove that Dr. Oziel could not work a tape recorder."

Bozanich dismissed the defense team's psychiatrists, child-abuse therapists and forensics experts as "spin doctors." But the prosecution's decision not to hire its own experts leaves all the defense's witnesses virtually undisputed. Most persuasive was Dr. William Vicary, a psychiatrist who specializes in sex offenders and has evaluated 750 accused murderers. After spending 88 hours with Erik, Vicary concluded that Erik had been the victim of sexual abuse. Asked why Erik had not spoken of the abuse until almost a year after the shootings, Vicary answered, "It's very common for people who have been molested to not come forward with that information. It's a dirty secret. There are powerful feelings of shame, self-blame, humiliation." Similarly, Stuart Hart, a professor of psychology at Indiana University, concluded after 60 hours of interviews with Lyle that the older brother had been "programmed" to keep the scandal quiet.

The court of public opinion is evenly divided on the brothers' fate. Callers to Court TV, which has devoted 600 hours to the trial, split on the question of whether they believed the brothers or the prosecution; so did a group assembled for Dateline NBC. Now it's up to the only viewers who count -- the jurors -- to decide.

With reporting by James Willwerth/Los Angeles