IV: Blah Blah, Black Sheep: The Inside Story?
“I knew from the first day they did it.” - Marta Cano
If you want to find someone to testify against their family, look for the one who has been ostracised, the one who never fit in to the family ethic, who was looked down upon by the rest of the family. The one who was never invited to the Thanksgiving dinners and who had to make their own way in the world, without any help or support from their family. In other words, look for the black sheep of the family.
Marta Cano was that black sheep. Jose’s older sister, she had been the first to leave home, a rebel even as a child, who refused to conform to the family’s obsession with swimming and sports, and had been left to raise five children on her own without any alimony when her husband skipped out on her and sued for divorce. She claimed that she had always known the two boys had killed her brother and his wife, and told the defence that Jose had been brought up as a spoiled, nasty, bad-tempered child by their mother, a kid who got everything he demanded and took no responsibility for anything he did. She said that though she had no evidence of it, she was convinced Jose too had been abused, and more, that he had become mentally ill somewhere along the line.
This I have to admit personally I find unlikely. If Jose Menendez was mentally unsound, could he have run the businesses he did, turning them from loss-making failures into booming successes, and building for himself a corporate empire? Could he have orchestrated his sons’ rise in the world of professional tennis, and not only survived but thrived in America as a poor immigrant who made good?
Mind you, I say she told the defence this, but she would not be allowed tell it to the jury, as Weisberg, tired of time-travelling, ruled that this was going back too far, and had no real relevance to the case. A crushing disappointment for Abramson, she was slightly mollified that he did allow Marta to give her impressions of the childhood of the two boys, a subject on which Jose’s sister had much to say. She spoke of how the two boys had been cowed by her brother, forbidden to speak unless spoken to, were ridiculed and constantly taken aside by their father for “talks”, in which, the defence would contend, he would indoctrinate the boys into his way of thinking, making it their way too, and sowing the seeds of his own destruction, and that of his wife.
While Erik, she said, was good to his mother, Kitty did not like Lyle, and was a bad mother. When Erik got lost on a shopping trip and it was announced over the tannoy that he had been found, Kitty noted that it was good that he had been found, and continued shopping, leaving him where he was. The reaction of the two boys to their aunt was completely different: Erik would run to Marta happily, while Lyle, from age two to four, would run away from her and hide. By age ten Erik had also begun avoiding her, and had developed a stutter, to his father’s rage and dismay. Kitty once told her that she wished the boys had never been born, as they had ruined her marriage. She said this knowing that Lyle was listening. It didn’t seem to bother her.
Kitty was portrayed further as a bad mother and a bad housekeeper by Marta, who said the house was a pigsty, with clothes, food and animal droppings everywhere, nothing tidied up, just a total mess. Bozanich, when it came her turn, questioned why, if all this were true, Marta would send her own son, Andy, to stay with the Menendezes. Marta had no answer. The defence case would drag on for three months and involve more than fifty witnesses as Abramson and her team tried to build a picture for the jury of - well, let’s be brutally honest about it here - two people who deserved what they got, a father and a mother who treated their children shamefully, raped and abused them, and pushed them to a point where the only recourse these “kids” had was to end the lives of their tormentors.
The most potentially explosive of these mostly hum-drum, thank-you-you-may-step-down witnesses turned out to be a woman of thirty-four, who had visited the Menendez house over three summers, and to whom, she claimed, Lyle had confided about the abuse. She had no proof of course, and it could have been an elaborate story, but what did she have to gain from lying? At the time, she said, she had taken her concerns to Kitty, who had acted as she always did; she refused to believe it (or knew already) and dragged Lyle away, no doubt to face his angry father. Dianne Vander Molen then went on to say that the two boys had sexually assaulted her, though in a strange, almost cold way, as if she were something they were not sure about, or as if they were experimenting.
“No-one was there behind the eyes” - Norman Puls, Erik’s maths tutor, 1987-1989
Many witnesses described how the two boys could just go blank, seem not to be there, such as the incident when Lyle had walked into the office of Alicia Hercz, the day school instructor at Princeton, sat down and said nothing for maybe forty minutes. Their tennis coach at the Calabasas Tennis Club, Douglas Doss, agreed. He said of Erik,* “He would just disappear mentally. He was gone.” Norman Puls had a similar experience with Erik when he tutored him in mathematics between 1987 and 1989. “No-one was there behind the eyes,” he remarked.
A picture was certainly being built up of two boys being controlled by their father and turning inwards as a result, of the possible warning signs of sociopathy and psychopathy that would one day turn them into heartless, remorseless, cowardly killers. Whether you could say the defence had managed to fulfill its brief in this regard or not, or indeed whether some of the testimony may have backfired on them, they had their ace in the hole ready to go, and it was something that everyone who was following the trial had been waiting for, the murder in his own words.
Lyle Menendez was about to take the stand.
“You’re a bastard! I wish you had never been born!” - Kitty Menendez, in Lyle’s testimony
Personally, I find it odd that Lyle began his testimony by trying to paint his family as an ordinary, or at least typical one. If the whole idea of their defence was that they were scared, terrified that their parents were going to kill them, that night they “preempted” Jose and Kitty by pumping round after round into them from their shotguns, would it not have made more sense to have built on the already pretty monstrous reputation of their father and use that as some sort of attempt at justification of murder? Seems to me that would be the way to go. But from the first, Lyle’s idea - or the one he had been told to pursue - was to show how gentle his father could be, almost as gentle as Kitty. How they played together, loved each other and, though Jose pushed his son to achieve greatness, that he did so for the boy’s own good. I mean, it’s hardly painting a picture of a couple of monsters, now is it?
Of course, this was just the prologue, the soft approach until the big guns were brought out, and pretty soon Lyle was launching into detailed accounts of how his father sexually molested him. He testified that it began when he was about age seven and then changed from fondling and touching to full sex when he was seven, turning to oral sex which became anal sex, and then Jose began using other things to penetrate him, such as a toothbrush. Though he said his father had raped him, and went to his mother, Kitty (according to him) brushed it all aside and said he was exaggerating. Now while I don’t for a moment believe these allegations, I will admit that from what I have read of her, this would be the kind of reaction I would expect from the mother of the Menendez boys. She was never a woman to face reality, and she was totally under Jose’s spell - perhaps intimidated by him, but I don’t think so - and so anyone badmouthing him in any way, especially such an abhorrent one, would get short shrift from her. She would be unlikely to believe even her own sons if they told her Jose was abusing them. So in a way here, Lyle was being very clever (or had been coached to be), by playing on what the jury already knew - or had been told and perhaps had taken as fact - about Kitty Menendez and shaping his narrative to fit that vision.