III: The Little Jewish Guy Who Was Never There: The Prosecution Rests
Donovan Goodreau testified that he had told Lyle that he had been molested by one of his father’s friends, but when Lansing pushed him to reveal whether or not Lyle had reciprocated and told him about the abuse he had suffered, he shook his head no. This took Lansing by surprise, as she had listened to part of a taped interview a writer had had with Goodreau for a book he was writing on the murders, in which Goodreau said that Lyle had confided in him. Lansing played him the tape, which confirmed what she had been told, and Goodreau shrugged and said he didn’t recall saying that. Kind of odd, when presented with clear evidence that he had said it, to not try to justify it or excuse it or claim it had been taken out of context, said in anger, coaxed out of him or anything like that, but to deny it?
But Bozanich had an idea. While Goodreau was being accused - in the court of public opinion only, not officially, though often the former is the more important - of perjury and therefore painted as an unreliable witness, the prosecutor pointed out that the likelihood was that the boy had been fed the information, which at the time was mere speculation and quite probably outright lies, and had simply related it in that manner. But just saying that would not be enough: Bozanich needed to get Donovan Goodreau on the stand and question him herself, which she did the next day. Whether he grabbed the lifeline she offered him, or whether he realised he was being used, he agreed that it did seem likely he had picked up the story about the boys taking baths with their father from the writer himself, and the issue was quietly fudged out, though the judge did not this time instruct the testimony to be removed from the record. Jurors would have to make up their own minds as to who was telling the truth.
Lyle’s behaviour after the killings became a focus again, as it would frequently, speaking as it did to his state of mind in the wake of the death of his parents. His spending sprees were catalogued by his bodyguard, including the possibility of getting a bullet-proof limo, and perhaps most damning of all (though the jury were not allowed to hear this) was his contention that on the evening his parents went to the funeral home, Lyle had gotten it on with one of his female relatives. Hardly shows a man in the throes of remorse and sorrow now does it? Lansing attempts to dirty Glenn Stevens’ role as Lyle’s friend due to his wearing a wire and reporting to the police earned her a sharp “Friendship transcends a lot of things, but homicide is not one of them.” Guess there’s no real answer to that one. In fact, Lansing had taken a chance there and put herself in the firing line, risking being seen as someone who was of the opinion that friends covered up for each other, no matter what the crime, including murder. That was a dangerous card to play, and she did her best to walk it back.
This entailed turning the spotlight back on Glenn Stevens, and what a bad person he was. She questioned his personal code of honour, made a lot out of nothing - some “embellishments” on his resume: I thought Muddy Waters wrote that song? But Stevens was in danger of handing her if not a smoking gun then at least a ticking time bomb. During the recess he spoke to Bozanich and admitted he had taken money from the register in the restaurant he had been managing for Lyle. It wasn’t a lot - a few hundred dollars - but in issues like this it’s often less the amount stolen and more the fact that the person could do such a thing. If he had stolen hundreds, could he not be expected to steal thousands? Lansing, should she learn of this, would love it and use it to its fullest extent to discredit Stevens as a witness, and more, as a man with an axe to grind against his old friend.
But Bozanich was and is an ethical person, and furthermore she knew the risk she would run, personally, if it came to light that she had hidden evidence from the defence. Not only would her own career suffer, but the trial might very well collapse. Stevens was only one witness anyway, and probably not a key one. Her duty was clear, and the defence licked their lips as she, probably through gritted teeth, revealed what Stevens had told her. As a result, Stevens was to lose his job on Wall Street. Not sure why: they’re all crooks there. Oh, probably because he admitted it. Cardinal sin, that. Page one, Glenn! Page one!
But all of this was really more frosting on the dark cake of murder, and served only to distract from the main thrust of the trial, which was determining the guilt of the two brothers, or rather, whether their motivation was sufficient to save them from the death penalty. The trial had now dragged on for four years. Other, more sensational trials had taken its place, like the already mentioned O.J. Simpson murder case, and until the allegations of parental sexual abuse were brought up, nobody seemed to care any more. Fresh interest was injected into the trial, as it always is, by juicy details of lurid accusations or sexual deviancy on the part of Jose and Kitty, and suddenly the trial was again front and center in America.
At least, among all the curses and hard words and fights and accusations and snipes at each other’s teams and witnesses, there existed a sense of a code of honour and mutual respect between the two attorneys. Abramson was seen to mouth “**** off” at Bozanich while she took a sidebar (private consultation or instruction with or from the judge, up at his bench) while for her part, the prosecutor described her opponent as a “piece of **** lawyer.” Ah, professional courtesy, huh? Nice to see too that Abramson’s husband, who worked at the LA Times and was accused of feeding her information from its reporters, greeted the charge with a remark worthy of his wife: “Go **** yourself.”
The expert to whom Bozanich had referred offhandedly as a “little Jewish guy” was up next, and Brian Witkin admitted that it was strange for a client to call him not to retrieve precious lost data on a computer, but to destroy what was there. Lyle’s comment, he testified, to not only delete the file but “make it look as if you were never here” was something that disturbed him and made him suspicious. “It made my spine crawl*,” he admitted. People generally don’t want data destroyed unless there’s something on it that they don’t want people to see, and often this tends to be incriminating evidence, whether in a legal sense or not. Lyle’s Uncle Carlos had hired his own expert, who arrived the following day, and whether Witkin had not done the greatest job or whether he had deliberately left traces, this other expert could tell that someone had tampered with the file.
*
This is a crossing of two metaphors. Your spine cannot crawl. Your skin can crawl, or you can get a shiver up or down your spine, but your spine is a long bone which can’t move in that way. Whether he got confused or not I don’t know, but this is not something people say. Just thought I’d point that out in my capacity as smartarse pedant.
The clashes between the judge and Abramson continued and intensified. He was constantly warning her about her behaviour, which included sarcastic shakes of the head, talking loudly at the defence table, and her inappropriately motherly attitude towards Erik, an obvious ploy to turn the grown man into a frightened boy for the jury’s benefit. All she was really short of doing was getting him a teddy bear to hold during the trial. She was certainly ready to turn her own disadvantage over the notes taken by Ward into an advantage, as she prepared to discredit Dr. Oziel’s tapes, intending to prove that they were at worst fabricated, at best a result of his coaching Lyle in what he said.
In this she had some unlooked-for but appreciated help, as Dr. Oziel was already under investigation by the California State Board of Psychology for engaging in “dubious practices”, including having sex with his patients, and was in danger of losing his licence. This in itself helped paint him as less than an expert witness, to say nothing of his moral character, all of which would play into the defence’s attempts to make his testimony worthless in the eyes of the only ones that mattered, the jury. But before she could begin her questioning, the usually arrogant and self-assured lawyer had to ask the judge what would constitute breakage of the therapist/patient privilege, because if she inadvertently strayed into this area with a careless question, a whole can of worms could be opened up, including a decision to exclude the other tapes from the trial becoming invalid due to her actions. Weisberg’s contempt for her showed in his snippy reply:
“It’s just like any other issue that’s presented in a trial,” he told her in exasperation. “Counsel don’t normally expect the court to rule in advance and give you a preview of what it is your trial strategy should be.”
Nevertheless, Weisberg’s personal dislike for Abramson did not necessarily place him in the corner of the prosecuting team. He refused to allow Oziel to use the word “sociopath” to describe the boys, even though they had used it themselves in therapy. He demanded instead that the therapist explain it in layman’s terms, and* Oziel described a sociopathic murder as being “being a murder that was predominantly a means to an end, something that the murderer believed was a way to achieve a particular end; and it was a planned, premeditated murder; and a way to deal with problem-solving; and that if there were emotions involved with it, they didn’t get in the way of needing to accomplish the end; and that once there was a decision that the murder had to be committed, it was committed; and feelings, basically, didn’t enter into it in a significant way.”
Oziel described how Erik had visited him on, oddly enough, Halloween - October 31 1989 - and after a walk and talk with the therapist had admitted he and his brother had killed their parents. Well, this wasn’t quite news at this point - had the prosecution been going for a confession, then this would have been potential dynamite, and it’s likely Abramson would have tried to find some way to object to or have this comment struck from the record. As it was, Oziel went on to say that on returning to his office he listened to Erik lay out the whole plan, how and why it had come about, and how they intended to carry out the murders.
Oziel had then contacted Lyle, he said, and told him that Erik had spilled the beans. The older brother rushed over, full of fury both at the betrayal by his brother and also at the now-insoluble problem of what to do about the therapist. After the session, Oziel said Erik told him, Lyle’s first words outside were “How do we kill Oziel?” Fearing, rather naturally, for his life, Oziel had had the tapes secured in a safe deposit box, with instructions that they be released to the police in the event of his death. An insurance policy, which Lyle must have raged at, thinking perhaps they should have done the therapist in that day before he had a chance to make plans for his own safety. But it was done, and there was nothing Lyle Menendez could do about it now.
Oziel went on to describe how the brothers had agreed ‘We’re sociopaths. We just get turned on by planning the murder. Once we plan it, nothing gets in the way. Once we start, nothing will stop us. Furthermore, we don’t think much about what we’re doing before we do it. Once we get going, we just go ahead and commit it and make it happen. And we can’t change the plan because it’s already formed perfectly.’ It was patently obvious by now that Lyle was growing into and taking over the role his father had played with Erik, as he did what he could to control him, keep him under observation, counsel and guide him and make sure he didn’t let anything else slip. Whether he realised this was happening or not I don’t know, but Lyle and Erik had clearly become Jose and Lyle, the process repeating itself as the stronger bore down on the weaker one.
After Kuriyama was finished grilling the witness, it was Abramson’s turn, but she found to her annoyance that he was able to give as good as he got. As a therapist he was used to people using words to suit their meaning, so was able to spar with the defence attorney and turn aside most if not all of her blows, leaving her looking foolish and a little desperate, and no doubt with even more hatred for the man than she had had before he had taken the stand.
As the prosecution prepared to rest its case, one detail still stuck out and annoyed them. Erik had said that Lyle had been watching a BBC movie some days before the murders, and it was from this that he had formulated his plan. But nothing in the BBC archives, on TV guide or any of the networks could pull up any similar sort of movie. Finally the mystery was solved almost by chance, as Kuriyama’s wife spotted a video in the rental store about the Billionaire Boys Club, the movie concerned with the murder Abramson had tried so much to distance the trial from, and once they had watched it, it was evident that there were stunning similarities between the two cases.
• One of the BBC victims was shot in the back of the head. The victim was then shotgunned in an effort to obliterate his identity.
• Joe Hunt talked about the perfect murder. The BBC killers’ alibi was that they had attended a movie the night of the slaying.
• The son of a multimillionaire Iranian who is slain in the BBC production proposes an alibi that his father had political enemies. Erik Menendez raised the issue of Castro engineering his Cuban-born father’s death.
• In the BBC movie, Joe Hunt drove a Jeep and wore a Rolex watch. Erik, after the killings, bought a Jeep; and Lyle, four days following the slayings, bought three Rolex watches.
Excitedly, Kuriyama presented the movie to the judge, asking that it be seen. Weisberg, however, had had enough, believed the trial had dragged on long enough, and refused. On August 13 the prosecution rested.
The case for the defence ran into a major problem right away, when Weisberg opined - but did not rule - that abuse could not be used as an excuse for murder. He clearly saw that Abramson was grasping at straws, and while the judge could not throw that idea out as a defence, his contempt for it and his own personal dismissal of the idea must have had some effect on the jury, who presumably would have taken his experience and legal expertise into account when making their deliberations.
The other string to Abramson’s bow was a thing called “imperfect self-defence”, which holds that if a person kills out of fear for their life, even if that fear is not justified, then a manslaughter verdict can be brought in. In an attempt to prove this, Abramson had turned to a man whose black-and-white world said that whenever a child killed a parent (regardless of the age of the chld) it was invariably the parent’s fault; they had abused the child. He made no allowance for, for instance, sociopathic or psychopathic children, those out for financial gain or revenge for perceived, but incorrect, mistreatment, or any of the myriad other reasons people can kill their parents. Just watch Killer Kids or Evil Twins or any of those programmes and you’ll see that sexual, physical or psychological abuse is rarely behind these crimes.
But not in the world of Paul Nones. He accepted, without any proof at all, that the Menendez boys had been driven to murder, and it was he who advised Abramson on how to present the two men as boys to the jury and to the television audiences. It was his idea to dress them in sweaters rather than suits, refer to them as children and research their history back to when they were babies, to try to prove or infer some historical abuse. I suppose it never occurred to this man, in his years of practice defending killer kids, that he was in fact laying down the groundwork for others to murder their parents, knowing - or hoping, or expecting or intending - that they would be looked on in a sympathetic light, and perhaps even get away with it. I guess as long as he kept getting paid and was able to expound his crazy theories, it really didn’t matter to him whether or not he set killers free, or attained more lenient sentences for them.