Intermission II: Abusing the Truth: The House of Cards Collapses
Let’s take a moment and consider these charges. I mean, I assume they were made up, a desperate ploy to lessen the sentence or even gain acquittal for the brothers, but could they have been real? Jose was a man who liked control, that much is certain. And let’s be honest about this, rape is one of the most absolute methods of control there is. You rape someone, you have complete power over them; you’re dominating them, forcing them to accede to your will, thinking nothing of their own rights or desires or health even, virtually taking over their body with yours. So that’s something you could certainly imagine the Menendez patriarch doing. However, there seems to be no other instance of his interfering with kids, and one thing that is generally known is that if a father abuses his own kids, he’s likely to try it with others too.
But while rape is a horrible crime, and rape of children ten times more so, in the strictest terms you can say a man who rapes his daughters, though scum of the lowest order, is still technically heterosexual. A man who rapes his sons, has to be considered homosexual. In general, I don’t think a man who exhibits homosexual tendencies confines them to his kids, and so we should surely expect to have seen evidence of Jose’s being intimate with other men, probably in gay bars and places like that. No such evidence was presented, nor did the defence try to. Such evidence would have proven a pattern of homosexuality that would lend more weight to the brothers’ accusations. Surely it would not have been for the want of trying, so there must have been nothing there to find.
As for Kitty? This I find even harder to believe. Statistically, the amount of women - mothers - who rape or even sexually interfere with their sons, or daughters, is so low as to be almost negligible. Women, and mothers in particular, are the nurturers, the carers, the protectors, and seldom if ever are accused in any sort of child abuse. The worst you can usually expect is that the mother knew and did nothing about it. Women are more tactile and emotional, but the brutality of rape is usually practiced against, not by them. How many men, honestly, do you know who have been raped by women? Sure, the usual problem that these crimes are not reported out of embarrassment exists, but overall I would still say the instances are seriously low. Women just don’t do that sort of thing.
And while you could say that yeah, maybe (if the allegations about him were true) Jose forced or bullied her into joining in, I still don’t see it. You really can’t change someone’s nature that radically, even with threats of violence (which were never mentioned) and if hurting your kids sexually is anathema to your gender, it would take either an incredibly strong-willed man (which sure,* Jose was, but there have to be limits) or a really weak-willed and submissive woman to allow that to happen. Weak in some ways Kitty may have been, but she and* Jose fought, so she wasn’t a shrinking violet, and I could not see her deliberately assaulting her children, even on Jose’s orders. I could see her ignoring it, convincing herself that Jose was, as always, right, and justifying it to herself, but not doing it herself.
But even so, I don’t believe it happened. Jose liked to think of himself as a man’s man, and I don’t see that he had any homosexual tendencies. I guess he could have been bisexual, but nevertheless, I feel this would have manifested itself outside of his family, especially given that he was such a powerful man who held the careers of so many in his hands. What I’m saying here is, if he wanted gay sex, he could have demanded it in return for not firing someone, or for them to gain a promotion, or whatever. The opportunities were there for him, but he is not recorded as having taken them, and let’s be honest here: if someone had been put in that compromising position, isn’t it likely they would have come forward with an accusation after the murders? But nobody did, so we can assume it never happened.
So a man who is not - so far as we know or can be proven or shown - homosexual is probably unlikely to show much or any interest in, or have a sexual attraction to his sons. Were these girls, yeah maybe, but my own mind is made up that this was all, well, made up; it’s just too convenient an excuse, a way of lessening the crime and making it look like the boys were the victims and all they were doing was protecting themselves.
Perhaps the most unbelievable part of the story though was when Lyle “admitted” he abused his brother, presumably having learned to do so from his father. In some ways, to me, this is like adding the final layer of **** on top of an already mucky cake; the embellishment that was not needed. What in fact did this serve to prove? That Lyle Menendez was as bad as his father? How was that going to help his case? I suppose he and his team thought that it might be seen to lessen his guilt if it could be shown that he was “emotionally damaged”, and turn the jury against his late father. Seems like it was one act too far though.
However it seemed to be working. The
Los Angeles Daily Journal agreed that his testimony, so far, was “compelling enough to, if nothing else, keep him off Death Row.” That, of course, was up to the jury, but get the public on your side (and the
Los Angeles Daily Journal is a legal newspaper, so we’re talking lawyers here) and it’s half the battle. Other details of Jose’s cruelty seem easier to believe. We know he was not a nice man, had little time - no time really - for the weak, and certainly did not believe in pets, another distraction from the grand destiny he had planned for his sons, and the story of his beating a rabbit to death which Lyle would not get rid of at his behest is not a hard one to credit. The things he tried to attribute to his mother, on the other hand, do not ring true. He spoke of her pushing his face in sheets he had wet, like an animal, and refusing to change them (I suppose that could be true, but the idea would probably be more her laziness and lack of caring than any real attempt to punish him: you wet them, you sleep in them, sort of thing).
Even stranger was his contention that she sometimes forced him to sleep under her bed, where a ferret they had went to the toilet. I have no idea why anyone would or could do that, and I also don’t believe Jose, proud in his own warped way of his boys, would allow such a thing. The idea of her rubbing her bloodstained hand in his face after she cut it on a door and blaming him, well yeah I could see that. Nobody is saying - certainly not me - that Kitty Menendez wasn’t a deeply disturbed woman. We’ve seen evidence of this already, and the above sounds like something she would do, refusing to take responsibility for something she had done and looking to not only blame someone else, but transfer any guilt or anger she had at it to them, essentially passing on her pain, as if perhaps this made her no longer feel it, though of course pain doesn’t act that way. But a lot of it is in the mind, and maybe she could convince herself, if she unloaded it onto Lyle, that it didn’t hurt as much, or even at all.
Lyle then spoke of his collection of toy animals. I’m not quite sure what this was meant to convey. Perhaps it was to illustrate how detached from reality his life had become, perhaps it was to show that his parents cared so little about him that he was able - that it was necessary - to retreat into a fantasy world of Cookie Monsters and Kermits, and the fact that this continued until he was seventeen is disturbing indeed. But unless he was trying to show that he was still immature at this age, and perhaps therefore not mentally responsible, I don’t see how it helped. At any rate, he certainly grew up, as such, when he met his first girlfriend, Stacy Feldman.
And now the stuffed animals story makes sense.
Courting her, Lyle sent her a note from him and all his animal friends. Look, I’ve done the same for my sister, but only to make her happy and because of the situation she’s in. I don’t believe any of them are real, but yeah, they all have personalities and names and storylines too. The difference is I know what’s real and what’s not; Lyle’s attempt to use these toys as a way of wooing his girl seems both childish and manipulative. What woman would be able to resist a man who is so soft emotionally and so vulnerable that he still plays with stuffed teddies? For the jury, it certainly seemed to strike a chord; the cold-blooded killer had metamorphosed, or perhaps devolved, in a short time to a harmless, lovable kid. Lansing’s plan was working perfectly so far; the defence had the jury in the palm of their hands. And how they squeezed!
However perhaps then Lyle went a little off the track, returning to the abuse he supposedly suffered at the hands of his mother. He spoke of her washing him when he was young and sleeping with her, but then claimed this went on till he was eleven years old, which has to be hard to believe. He also claimed that his mother became “furious” when he rejected her advances and stopped sleeping in the parental bed, and that it coloured their relationship for the rest of his life - well, until he killed her that is. I suppose there could be supporting evidence for this in that he did give Kitty the longest and most brutal death of the two parents: Jose was shot outright, head blown away, but Kitty was hunted down like an animal as she crawled away, and took many wounds before she was finished off.
If she was the monster he painted her as, perhaps even worse than his father, then it could be accepted that he would have made her death as slow and painful as possible, within the limits of the time frame they had. That however does not correspond with what he told the cops, that she had to be killed because she could not live without their father. One way or the other, there was a lie there. Either Kitty was killed the way she was in a sort of sick revenge, and then the boys lied about why she had been shot, or she was simply brutally murdered because these were two stone-cold and money-obsessed killers, and the sexual abuse was then a lie. Can’t have it both ways. To say nothing of a letter Lyle sent her in 1987, in which he was very friendly and wished her well. If someone has been sexually torturing you for years, this is not the kind of thing you write to them.
“Hi mom. How are you? Hope you’re alright and hanging in there. I often worry about you. You’re the only mother I have or could want.” Right. Sounds like he was really scared of/hated her. A year’s a long time, admittedly, but it seems very odd that in the same year - I don’t know if it was after or before the incident - (1987) - Lyle had had a huge row with his mother who had torn the hairpiece off his head and snarled he didn’t need it. Lyle had been suffering male pattern baldness from an early age and even his brother did not know about the hairpiece. Lyle had secured it with some sort of solvent so it really hurt (he said) when his mother ripped it off. There was no reason given for this outburst, which makes it harder to believe. Did Kitty suddenly lose it for no reason? Surely he must have known how unlikely this, and his even more fantastical follow-up, sounded to the jury?
They were supposed to accept that having seen Lyle’s “big secret” revealed, Erik then decided to tell him that their father had not stopped abusing him. First, the idea that Jose Menendez would take any sort of order, or threat, from his son seems laughable, so the chances that Lyle even confronted him seem small, the chance that Jose acceded to his demand even smaller. But assuming that did happen, it seemed their father had perhaps just said what his son needed to hear, and went on doing what he was doing. Which was likely nothing, but in the context of Lyle Menendez’s story, he was said to have continued the abuse. And now Lyle wanted the jury to believe that the two boys were going to threaten their father that if the abuse did not stop they would go to the authorities. As if they hadn’t had a chance before, assuming any of this nonsense was true. What made them think they could go now, and what proof had they? Despite his general dislike in the community, Jose Menendez was a respected businessman, and indeed a figure to be feared. Were the cops likely to take the word of the boys over that of their father, without any evidence to back up their claims?
Kind of odd, too, how the maid reported nothing out of the ordinary on the day Lyle apparently confronted his father, and claimed the house was “in chaos” as he also pounced on Kitty, demanding to know why she had condoned the abuse? If there was that sort of row going on, isn’t it more likely that - under oath - any servant, or anyone else in the house, would have heard it and have to testify to the uproar? Yet she said she heard nothing. I suppose it was a big house, and she could have been on the other side of it or something - doesn’t make clear where she was - but even so, you would think that at some point she would have come within earshot of such a ruckus.
Listening to Lyle outline the lead-up to the killing, any jury person would have been somewhat convinced that the two boys felt in fear of their lives, but then, it’s really easy to put words into the mouth of a dead man or woman. There is no way to know, for instance, whether Jose sighed “What does it matter anymore?” when Erik asked about going to a tennis camp, or whether Kitty raged that her husband had ruined everything by not keeping his mouth shut. These all serve to colour and support the narrative, but they might just as easily never have been said. In fact, if you think about it (and it’s hard to get into the mindset but if you try), if you’re considering killing your kids would you not be careful to avoid dropping any hints, giving the game away? Would you not instead try to keep them in a false sense of security, pretend everything was alright, deter them from any suspicion? Yet here Lyle made several references to comments made that left the two of them in no doubt, apparently, that their lives were in danger.
The story Lyle told of the actual killing seems to bear little if any resemblance to the truth. He maintained that after an argument over the movies the two had rushed upstairs, loaded their shotguns and come down firing. He mentioned that Kitty had been pushed into the den by Jose, who had
locked the doors, so how could she have got out and into the living room in order to be shot by her sons? There’s no explanation for this: Lyle says he saw Jose push Kitty into the den and then he speaks of her crawling on the floor behind the sofa after her husband had been shot. So how had she got back into the room, and, if she heard shotgun reports, why? Who in their right mind goes towards danger when they are already locked away from it? By rights - if this is to be believed - she would have had to have been in the room, heard the shots, surely had an idea what was going on,
found a way to unlock the door and plunged into the line of fire, completely defenceless. Why would anyone do that?
Also note: Lyle maintains he shot his father while* Jose was standing, and that he fell back onto the sofa. I don’t think the forensic evidence supports this, rather that Jose was already sitting when he was hit. That being the case, then the story is false, and you’d have to wonder why he changed it when he could have just said he came in through the door firing and Jose was sitting down and not expecting an attack. At least that might have tied in a little with the actual facts.
Speaking of facts, testimony from Jamie Pisarcik, Lyle’s former girlfriend, would come back to haunt him when the prosecution began cross-examining him. To cast doubt on the claim that Jose was a sex-obsessed pervert, Jamie told a story wherein Lyle had asked her to make up a story about his father assaulting her sexually, which he would then pay her for. She refused, and made it quite clear that* Jose had never gone near her. As a piece of evidence, this showed how desperate Lyle was to try to paint his father in the worst light possible, and surely tied in to the pre-meditated nature of the murders. If Lyle (and Erik, but mostly Lyle, who was clearly the mastermind behind the slaying) wanted to be able to say that they had killed their parents because of abuse suffered at their hands, then the more of a lech and a pervert they could make Jose look, the more their story would stand up. But here, with Jamie Pisarcik’s testimony, that part of it came tumbling down.
However - and I don’t quite understand this - instead of the prosecution introducing this evidence it was allowed for the defence to do it, as a way I suppose of controlling what was released, but either way it didn’t help. When Bozanich did get to cross-examine him it took four days, and though Lyle* held up well under her relentless barrage of questions (I imagine you could characterise it more as an interrogation, as the opposite side will often seem to be in any case - good cop bad cop) he did trip a few times, such as when he described his life as a living hell, and then had to retrace this when the prosecutor pointed out that he and Erik had, by and large, lived a life of luxury. The callous murder of his mother also stuck in the jury’s craw, especially as he made it clear he believed that she was trying to escape when he shot her.
This was the age of televised court cases, and Court TV were having a field day with the case. Their reporter, Gerry Spence, believed Lyle had done well but that there was little to no emotion in his voice, and he believed that Bozanich was, to some extent, allowing the defendant to control the narrative (a holdover from what his father had taught him no doubt: always be the one to control things), and while the general populace seemed to dislike both of the boys, those who had suffered abuse in their lives looked to be on their side. In this age, more than any other, with the coming of network television and before the internet had a proper hold on the world, defendants were basically tried in two courts, the law court and that of public opinion. Of course, the latter had no legal power, but even so, what the jury heard on the street and on the TV when they went home for the night was bound to affect them, even if they tried to ensure it did not.
And then it was time for Erik to take the stand.