Trollheart

Intermission: Scripting in Crayon

I’d just like, again, to pause here and consider the so-called script that Erik and Cignarelli wrote. I haven’t read it (must see if it’s available online) but from what I understand it’s a very bland, boring, cliched and predictable story. Guy finds out he’s due a huge inheritance and kills his parents. Nothing much happens. He gets caught and dies with a smile on his face. Meh. Why did the two of them think Hollywood would be falling over themselves to produce that rubbish? Why would anyone be interested? Why would anyone watch such unimaginative trash? I suppose it goes back to the super-ego of any Menendez, all of whom believed implicitly in the superiority of their family and who could not conceive that anything that came out of them could not be gold. Erik probably thought they (more he; I would imagine he thought he was the creative brains behind a script I could have crapped out) had written The Great Gatsby or something, and expected a bidding war.

That’s him, and that would not be a surprising way for a Menendez to view his own work. It was his, so therefore must be of tremendous value. It could not possibly be bad. But what about Craig Cignarelli? Unless he was as much a narcissist as his friend, he must have known that the script was garbage. He can’t seriously have thought that they screenplay they put together was anything better than something any Hollywood hack or even student in his bedsit could bang out, and equally worthless? Was he relying on the contacts Erik had through his father, to get them a deal? Did he think the Menendez name would be enough to get them signed up, despite the peurile nature of the story? Or was he just carried away on perhaps the wave of Erik’s enthusiasm and conviction that they were going to hit it big?

In the end, the pathetic script of “Friends” was destined not even to play a small part in the trial of its co-author for murder, as it was excluded by the judge, so it’s hardly even a footnote in the history of the Menendez murders. It was of course praised by Kitty, but then, Erik could have wiped his arse with a piece of typing paper and presented it to his mother as a script and she most likely would have gushed about how great it was. Till he shot her dead, of course. I wonder what Jose would have made of it? Would he have seen in the amateurish scrawl the warning, a foreboding of his own grisly death? Or would he just have dismissed it, as he did almost everything his younger son did, contempt in his eyes?

Back to the trial anyway.



Cignarelli proved a difficult witness for Abramson, so used to being in control, to keep in check. To some extent she must have felt like a cowboy trying to keep a wild stallion from bucking and bolting, using all her skill to calm him down. But Cignarelli did not want to calm down. He also did not intend to be told what he could and could not say, and when he brought up a reference to the Billionaire Boys Club murder, almost ten years prior, she did not want her boys linked with that scandal and asked for his testimony to be stricken from the record, which Judge Weisberg agreed with. He told the jury to disregard Cignarelli’s comments.

Now this has always confused me. How can you ignore or disregard something you’ve heard but have been told not factor into your decision when deliberating in the jury room? Of course, you’re not supposed to let it influence you, but if you hear a defendant say, for instance, that he hated dogs and the case was an animal cruelty case (for example) how hard would it be not to let that play on your mind and even subconsciously take it into account when discussing the case with your fellow jurors? I mean, it’s not like people have delete buttons where you can literally forget what you’ve been told just because a judge says so. I believe I would find it hard to disregard any testimony I was told to, once I had heard it, and I also believe that this jury kept that in mind, despite the judge’s instructions to the contrary.

Cignarelli was able to drop a bombshell - well, it would have been one if the brothers had denied the killings, which they had initially but had now admitted to, placing all their emphasis on why they had done it. He said about two weeks after the murders Erik had told him how it had been done, and then made some cryptic remark about all great leaders having no parents, or some nonsense that he had to quickly backtrack on and try to explain. There was no mention of any abuse, which might seem strange, as these two were the closest friends could be really, and you would imagine they would have shared everything. If Erik could talk to anyone, other than his older brother, surely it would have been Craig Cignarelli?

But then, another friend of the brothers was about to blow a serious hole in the prosecution’s case.

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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.

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Trollheart

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.

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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.

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The defence could only have been in fear of how he would react. Lyle, the older brother, the one seen as the driving force behind the plan, was a tough, resilient, even cold man, well able to fence with Bozanich and turn her words against her, able to meet the eyes of the jury and - most likely - lie through his teeth convincingly. Erik, on the other hand, was the weaker of the two, the younger, the one who was more sensitive. He had broken down after the murder, and it had been Lyle who had had to keep it together when the cops came. How would he fare now, away from his brother’s protection, out of the sheltering arms of his god (as he had once described his brother), all alone in a small box and subjected to the laser-sharp focus of Bozanich’s interrogation? If anyone were to break, she must have known her best shot was with the younger Menendez, and she was not about to go easy on him.

The problem here was twofold. First, all the “good bits”, to use an entirely inappropriate term (if this wasn’t all made up) had already been heard by the jury. If the abuse was real, then both had suffered more or less the same, and so there really wasn’t much new to be revealed. The shock, such as it was, had been already felt and Erik was now treading over old ground. Not that repeating it might make the abuse seem less in the eyes of the jury, but the first time you hear something shocking you react, the second time, not so much. Add to that the fact that, perhaps despite expectations to the contrary, Erik Menendez was not overly emotional on the stand - in fact, after an initial tearful outburst it was said he looked more mentally deranged than upset - and the impact of his testimony further withered. In fact, it might even seem that having Erik testify all but damaged the case, as the sympathy that had been begun to be built up for his brother started to slowly evaporate.

As well as that, Erik’s contention that his mother was spying on them, had tape-recordings of conversations they had had and had tapped their phone lines is not backed up by any evidence. If such recording equipment existed, surely the police would have found it? But nothing is mentioned, so it had to be made up. Kitty would not have had the time - or indeed, thought it necessary - to get rid of it, as she had no idea she was about to be killed, so if it was there, where did it go? Another piece of nonsense that helps both show that these two killers were not anywhere near as clever as they thought they were, and that they were making things up. And they surely were. And I think they went too far, tried to be too graphic. In Erik’s account of the alleged abuse, he spoke of his father sticking pins and tacks into him in various places. As a counterbalance to that, a local rag had the so-called story of a hooker whom Jose had used for “rough sex”, but seemed to entail only (!) choking. If Jose was* this depraved, would he not have broached the subject of this kind of treatment with the woman, and even if she had - probably quite rightly and sanely - told him to **** off, would she not, if they were trying to paint him as a monster, have mentioned that this was what he wanted to do, even if she refused? But all she could come up with was that he liked to choke her. Sick, but not necessarily that big a deal.

It now also emerged that Jose - surprise, surprise! - was homophobic. Now, I suppose there are some ways people like that can get around and justify and excuse sex with boys, convincing themselves that it’s not gay (though of course it is, but far worse than that) but if a man is that much against sex with other men - Jose was said to “hate gay people” - then why would he even be attracted to his sons? It really doesn’t make any sense. And then Erik tried to say that he had begun putting cinnamon in his father’s tea, so that his semen would taste better. How could anyone get away with putting cinnamon - a very strong, spicy taste - in what they drank without them noticing? As well as this, far from being the abuser and crazy person Erik and Lyle both described her as, Erik’s first girlfriend, Jan, saw Kitty as a sister, and said she helped to hold the family together.

If anyone’s ever watched Judge Judy, you’ll know that one of her well-used maxims is that if you tell the truth you don’t have to have a good memory. This is, in fact, inaccurate; you could easily have a bad memory and be trying to tell the truth, and in fact our memories work, as I have recently found, in such a way that we don’t actually remember what happened, but the last time we remember remembering, if you understand. Our memories are predicated on the most recent data, like computers that have been recently backed up, but the original files may have been overwritten, lost or changed since then. I’ve seen this in action myself; something I was certain was true turns out to be not at all as I remembered it, as I watch the evidence myself and say “But I could have sworn…” So our memories are not actually reliable, unless I suppose you’re someone who has an eidetic (photographic) memory.

However, leaving that to one side, the other half of that quote is true, mostly: if you lie, you have to keep remembering what the lie is. This is of course why when two people have been accused of and arrested for a crime, the police will interview each separately, to see if their stories match, to see, in effect, if they are lying, if they both tell - or remember - the same lie. It can, I’m sure, be very hard to keep all the details straight, and this pressure to keep lying, and lying properly, would have a devastating effect on the defence as one of the boys’ lies would be revealed in stark and stunning effect. And like any attorney who knows he has an ace up his sleeve, Kuriyama would lead his victim into the trap slowly and with relish before snapping the steel jaws tight on him, and leaving him nowhere to go.

A major part of the Menendezes’ story was that they had looked in the Big 5 store at guns, but had decided not to purchase there due to the fifteen-day waiting period, which they could not afford to observe. After ensuring that Erik knew exactly what he was saying, after removing any doubt or the possibility of misunderstanding or misinterpretation, after getting Erik to repeat his words so that the boy was completely aware of what he was swearing to, Kuriyama dropped the bomb. He told Erik - and the jury - that the Big 5 stores had ceased carrying handguns a year prior to the boys supposedly shopping and seeing them there for sale. Gasps erupted around the courtroom. The hearts of the defence team must have sunk. Erik looked outmanoeuvred and shocked, unsure what to say in the face of such damning contradiction of what he had sworn to be the truth. The best he could do was stutter that maybe it wasn’t a Big 5 store - but hadn’t they the receipt?

Apart from anything else, this huge blunder - and it was huge - threw a bright, sharp light on the defence team of Abramson. Why had her people not checked to see if the Big 5 did carry guns at that time? Why had they allowed such an important piece of evidence elude them, and show their clients up for the liars they were? And if they had not checked that, what else had they missed? What else might the surely now feeling triumphant prosecution team reveal? Was their entire case now to be blown apart due to a lack of thoroughness in checking facts? One final thought before the prosecution finished its cross-examination, one last shot across the bows, a grenade launched into the defence. Kuriyama showed a picture of the death scene, in which it could be seen there was an application form for UCLA ready to be filled out. If the parents were planning to kill their children, he asked, if, as Jose had sighed, “it didn’t matter any more”, then why were they bothering to fill in the application?

As they say, mic drop.

However, there was of course no way that Abramson and her team were going to allow testimony as to whether or not Erik and Lyle had been abused to hang only on the boys’ own accounts, and as in any alleged abuse case (though this was not, as Pam Bozanich pointed out sharply, an abuse case but a murder one), the experts were wheeled in. As is quite often the case with experts, they don’t like their opinions to be challenged, and so it was with the first, Dr. Ann Tyler. As she constantly focused on the “abuse” Erik has supposedly undergone, she made no reference to the murder and kept calling him a “child”. Bozanich set her straight, asking questions like, had she even read Oziel’s notes (she hadn’t) and if she seriously considered the jewel burglary that the two had pulled off as “acting out” and a “prank”? Her most damning question was saved for last, when she snapped “How does a child suffer abuse from year zero?” in response to Tyler’s contention that, somehow, Erik and Lyle had both been abused before they were born! What happened? Jose shout at them in the womb? Punch Kitty in the stomach?

Her badgering was so bad that the usually hard-as-nails Abramson was moved to request an admonition from the judge for Bozanich’s treatment of the witness, claiming (with a straight face, mind) that it was “disrespectful”. She was, of course, overruled. Tyler left the witness box a lot less confident and sure of herself than she had been when she had entered it. Bozanich even noted that she felt sorry for her, that it was nothing personal, just her job. Kuriyama had no such qualms, and believed she deserved everything she got. The second defence witness, Professor Ann Burgess, an expert in psychiatric mental health, claimed that the murder had not been pre-planned, and introduced a phrase nobody had heard before to the case, but which the defence would no doubt use again and again: automatic pilot. It was a handy way of saying that the two Menendez brothers had no real control over their actions, that their senses had been heightened to the point where instinct had taken over and they just went along for the ride. Bozanich snarled at her if she knew what psychobabble was? Professor Burgess lied she did not: everyone knows what psychobabble is.

Trials like these ones bring all sorts of people out of the woodwork, and you can bet the crazies will come, too. And they did. Kuriyama received death threats, as did the judge and as an umbrella group, the prosecution. A woman stood outside bewailing the lack of sympathy being given to “abuse survivors”, and as usual the late-night talk shows and comedy show discussed the trial, made up skits, lampooned the brothers. From what I’ve read anyway, just them: I see a Saturday Night Live sketch where the sympathy was clearly with the prosecution, and while there may have been others who were not, there’s no accounts of them. That’s not to say that all of America was against the Menendezes, but when SNL does a sketch and there are no real objections (or none mentioned anyway) it’s usually a pretty clear indication that the majority at least of their viewers agree, or at least do not disagree or don’t care enough to phone or write in.

Dr. Kerry English was a defence witness who caused a lot of trouble, though not from being adversarial or planting false images in the minds of jurors. He found evidence in Erik’s medical records from 1977, where a note was made of a “hurt posterior pharynx, uvula and soft plate…” which are all in the throat and point to an injury there. This could, he said (and of course the defence claimed, had been) be due to being forced to swallow* Jose’s cock. It could, however, he agreed* with Bozanich, be caused by many other factors. It was not proof, but it was the first support to what the boys had been claiming, the first actual possible proof of sexual assault that had not come from their stories alone.

Another doctor, this time Kitty’s therapist, testified that not only had she been suicidal, but she had laid out plans as to how she was to kill herself. However this had been at the time when she had found out about Jose’s lover, Louise. Unsurprisingly, Jose’s colleagues spoke badly of him, calling him controlling, arrogant, vain. Nobody was sorry he was dead, or indeed surprised. But if you inch open a door you would rather remain closed, don’t be surprised if your rival tries to boot it open all the way. Having brought up the issue of the Menendezes’ mental state through the testimony of their expert witnesses, the defence had given Bozanich and her team leeway to demand the release of all of Oziel’s tapes, which up to then the judge had very much restricted access to, allowing only one to be presented in evidence. The prosecution’s argument that once the line was crossed, once Abramson had broached the issue of mental state, they should be able to explore that too, was a compelling one and hard to ignore. Weisberg said he would consider it.

Having weighed up the decisions made by the Supreme Court, the Superior Court and the Court of Appeal, Weisberg ruled that he agreed with all three and would not overrule their edicts. However, in the case of the tapes - particularly the December 11 session, the one Bozanich wanted, in which Lyle apparently laid out his plan to murder his parents - he made a ruling that they were not, as Abramson had contended originally, covered under attorney-client privilege, and he would therefore allow them into evidence. It was a shattering defeat for the defence, whose entire strategy would now have to be reshaped to try to limit the damage - indeed, possibly the carnage - that the revelations on that tape would cause. It could very well be the end of their case.

However, they were not going down without a fight. Resigned now to the fact that the tape would be played for the jury, the defence set Lansing the task of trying to mitigate its content by trying to turn the spotlight back on Dr. Oziel, and convincing the twelve men and women that what they were about to hear was an elaborately-staged deception, something orchestrated by the therapist to try to make the brothers look bad, and have something to blackmail them with. The tape showed Lyle talking about putting his mother out of her misery, as if it was a mercy killing, due to her suicidal nature and the fact that she could not be expected to live, or to want to live, without her husband. The biggest shock though, surely, for the jurors, was that all through the discussion, even when pressed as to why he believed Jose had to die, Lyle never once mentioned sexual abuse of any sort. He said his father was cold and controlling, and that he was ruining their mother’s life, but nothing about any abuse.

The taped session also revealed a man markedly different to the picture both brothers, and the defence team, had painted of Jose Menendez. He was controlling and tough, yes, but there was a sense of responsibility and duty about him, Lyle believed he loved his sons and only wanted them to be the very best they could be. He even went so far as to describe one night when his father had broken down and cried. Hardly the portrait of a cold, unfeeling, dominating monster the jury had heard up to now. Then, most surprising of all, Erik, who had not really spoken for much of the tape, said he really missed his father and regretted having killed him. That did not sound like a boy who had been driven to bloody and brutal murder at the hands of a sexual predator, a kid who had finally had enough and done what he felt he needed to do to be rid of his tormentor.

Rather amazingly, and surely insultingly, Lyle made the case that Kitty had actually tacitly given permission for them to kill her; that she had wanted to commit suicide but was too weak or frightened to go through with it. But she wanted to die, and Lyle arrogantly claimed that what they had done, he and Erik, in killing their parents took “courage beyond belief.” The conversation on the tape totally contradicted their story that they rushed upstairs in a panic, loaded their guns in fear of their lives and came down shooting. In a calm, unhurried and flat voice, Lyle seemed to shrug* “She gave us permission -* kill me, kill us before you leave,” and he noted “the time was now.” To gasps around the courtroom, he likened losing his parents to losing his pet dog. As Conte left the courthouse he was heard to say that he believed the tape had “sunk” the two brothers, though then adding that he thought they had already been sunk.

The revelations on the tape were clearly a big problem for the defence, who did their best to brush them aside, but were not blind. Most tellingly, they made it quite clear that, despite what both of the boys had claimed, neither revenge for alleged sexual abuse practiced on them both, nor fear for their lives figured in the murder of their parents. They had coldly, clinically decided* Jose had to die, and that Kitty would not be able to live when he was dead, so that her murder was seen by them more in the light of a mercy killing. Perceptions had certainly been turned* on their head, and the cold, flat voice of Lyle Menendez recounting their plan to Oziel must have put the chills up some, if not all, members of the jury.

But they had what might be called the turncoat witness, Judalon Smyth, Oziel’s ex-lover, and the one who had, as she had said herself at the time “delivered the brothers to the prosecution on a silver platter.” Now claiming she had been brainwashed by her lover and had had memories and suggestions implanted, and that he had been threatening her, and in apparent anger at her case against him for rape not being taken by the D.A., Smyth was testifying for the defence, and doing her best to unravel most of the evidence she had given Bozanich and Zoeller, trying to say it was all made up on Oziel’s instructions, or at least tailored by him to his desires. Mind you, she doesn’t sound like she’s playing with a full deck: some sort of nonsense about a “Sex IOU contract” between her and Oziel, witnessed by her two cats? Right. A very reliable witness then.

Finally, after nearly three months, Abramson and her team was done. The defence rested.

It was now the prosecution’s turn.

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The first and perhaps most important task Bozanich had was to try to rehumanise the two victims, who, in the flurry of pseudo-psychiatry, had somehow been pushed to the side. As the lead prosecutor had told the press the previous day, she had to keep reminding herself there were two dead bodies in the case, the defence having twisted and warped the trial into all other sort of shapes, and misdirected and redirected the attention of both the jury and the judge, as well as the public. What should have been a simple enough murder trial had now* become a test of America’s reaction to child abuse, even if this was only alleged. The focus had been too much for the last few months on why the brothers had killed their parents, not how they were going to pay for such a crime. With an admission of guilt, however, it seems unlikely to me, at best, that they could be acquitted. Nevertheless, they might face some charge of diminished responsibility or mitigating factors which would shorten their sentence. I suppose they could have been found not guilty. I’m not really sure how the law works in that regard; if you’ve admitted you did it, can you still be let free?

Bozanich began calling witnesses who were tied to the Menendez family by blood. First though there was a pool cleaner, Grant Walker, who was able to testify that, contrary to their story that they had stayed away - ostensibly in fear - from their parents on the day of the killing, he had seen both boys there with their mother, and both seemed to be arguing with and cursing at her. Unlike many of the witnesses Abramson had already demolished, like the cop from New York who had been detailed to drive Erik around, Walker did not crack, and stuck calmly to his story. The maid, Flor Suria, testified she had heard no argument on the day in question, and also refuted the suggestion that there were pornographic magazines in the house, especially homosexual ones.

Jamie Pisarcik was persuaded to take the stand, and testified she had broken up with Lyle when he had admitted, from jail, that they had killed their parents. She also blew a hole in another contention of the defence, that it had been the sight of Lyle’s hairpiece that had shocked his brother into confessing to him about the so-called abuse, making it clear Erik had seen the wig long before that, so his story could not be true. She also revealed that Lyle had sent her to the law library in Santa Monica, looking for files on cases in which children had been found not guilty after killing parents believed to have been abusing them. Of course her testimony did not go unchallenged, and Abramson did all she could to discredit the girl, scoring some points. Brian Andersen, Kitty’s brother, however, held his nerve better, and dropped a bombshell for both defence and prosecution when he casually admitted his sister had been in therapy. Jose’s secretary spoke of Lyle rather callously wearing his father’s shoes the day after the memorial service and joking about being able to fill them.

The Hammer of Justice Falls, But...

Finally, the case was over. Both the prosecution and the defence had presented their cases, and rested on December 3. To the defence’s dismay, Judge Weisberg refused to allow the jury to consider a verdict of not guilty, but did instruct them that they could bring one in of manslaughter if they felt that was appropriate. However on January 13 (for Erik) and 27 (for Lyle)* the verdict returned was not one of manslaughter, nor was it murder. It wasn’t any verdict. The jury was hung and Weisberg had to declare a mistrial. This could be seen as a victory for the defence, but at least it didn’t mean the brothers avoided a verdict of guilty of murder, and the DA promised he would try the case again. Which he did.

With this time limited evidence allowed by Weisberg of the so-called sexual abuse, and no cameras allowed in the court, the jury found both brothers guilty of first-degree murder and they were sentenced to life without the possibility of parole. They only avoided the death penalty due to their previous lack of a criminal record, and no doubt due to their money and contacts. The jury this time rejected completely the idea that the two had killed their parents in fear of their lives, and the whole thing was reduced to what it most likely was: murder for greed and gain. Ironically, reflecting the great Charles Dickens in Bleak House, as the original trial wound on their parents’ estate was all but swallowed up to pay the costs of their expensive defence team, so even had they been somehow acquitted (which was never an option) they would not have stood to inherit the fortune they had expected, and for which they had murdered both their parents.

Erik Menendez and Lyle Menendez, inseparable as brothers to the point where they teamed up to kill together, were finally split up, sent to different prisons, and did not see each other again for another twenty-two years, when they were finally reunited in 2018, housed in the same cell block. Multiple appeals were constantly turned down by superior and state courts. Both brothers eventually married, Lyle’s first lasting a mere five years, from 1996 to 2001, whereupon he remarried two years later. Erik married in 1999.

It may have taken a very long time, but eventually the lies of the Menendez brothers fell on deaf ears, and, mostly hated by America - probably, it has ot be said, more for the fact that they were rich kids who seemed about to get away with murder than out of any real remorse for the deaths of their parents - the two arrogant rich scions of the business mogul who had callously but successfully driven everyone before him, crushing those in his path, determined to leave behind a legacy he could be proud of, will spend the rest of their miserable lives in a small jail cell, dreaming perhaps of what might have been.

Of course there were the movies, the TV documentaries and many books written about the crimes and the trials of the Menendez brothers, but that’s only to be expected. Unfortunately, few people want to read about saints, or philanthropists, or even heroes who save people; well, the last, maybe, but those who read about their exploits will soon forget them, whereas the stories of evil remain in our minds and, sadly, our hearts. As Shakespeare’s Marc Antony said in Julius Caesar, "the evil men do lives after them", or to put it in more modern parlance, evil sells.

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Trollheart

The Unkindness of Strangers - the Murder of Kitty Genovese

Ah, you say: another murder. Didn’t you just get through an extended account about two brothers murdering their parents, Trollheart? What was that you said in the introduction: not all these articles will feature murder or killing, as evil comes in many forms? And now, here you are, again with the murder. What gives? Well, apart from the fact that the last statement shows your age (or mine, really, as I wrote it) let me tell you that this is in fact not a story about murder. Well, it is, but not only murder. Let me explain.

The main thrust of this article is centred on the callousness and lack of interest of people, the idea that anyone could hear a cry for help, know - or have a good idea - that someone was being attacked, even murdered, just within earshot, and not go to their aid or at the very least phone the police, is what we’re dealing with here. The old and by now more entrenched than ever idea of not getting involved, not wanting to get involved, nothing to do with me. Is this evil per se? Have we not all done this ourselves, as the author of the book I chose to research this, A.M. Rosenthal says in Thirty-Eight Witnesses? Well, no, I have to say I have not. That could be due to the fact that I never went out that much, and a lot less now since Covid and since Karen got sick, but even in my youth I never came across anyone in distress to whom I did not render aid. Maybe I was lucky and just never found myself in that position.

I like to think, as we all surely do, and maybe have, that I would go to someone’s assistance in a case like that. Oh, I don’t kid myself I would run out and confront someone - I’m a skinny Irish man with no skill in fighting and a devout follower of the Church of Cowardice, or at least its branch office, the Temple of Caution. It would, after all, be foolish and precipitous, and very dangerous to run into a hostile situation without knowing what you’re running into. But I think i would call for help at the least. Well, we all do, as I say. We all think that. But we have to. Who, after all, is going to say if I heard someone being beaten up or attacked I wouldn’t call the cops? I suppose, put it in a domestic situation - you hear your neighbour being beaten up, shouts, screams, curses - sure, you might turn back to the TV or your writing or whatever you’re doing and shrug. Just another argument that has nothing to do with you.

But outside, where someone is clearly being attacked? You wouldn’t even phone the cops? Look, I have my own tiny story to tell, and I’m a little ashamed but at the same time I’m glad it’s the only instance I can say this happened to me. Years ago, I was brushing my teeth I think - in the bathroom anyway - when I heard a girl seemingly in trouble, groaning “Leave me alone!” and a sarcastic male voice mimicking her. Now there are many reasons I didn’t run out. One, and the most important, is my membership of that church I told you about and my lack of any sort of fighting skill, muscle or being in any way able to intimidate anyone. But there were other reasons.

I didn’t know where the voices were coming from. My estate is built in such a way that you can hear voices that could be streets away, and we sort of really don’t have streets anyway. It’s a bit of a failed experiment, almost a totally enclosed housing estate with just one or two roads running through it for traffic. It’s not like your normal estate where you have houses on one side and houses on the other and a street in between. Hard to describe, but many of the houses back onto each other and cluster in clumps, so you could be talking about someone at someone’s back garden, or even at a corner you couldn’t get to. The voices could also have been engaged in some sort of disagreement rather than anything violent: I certainly heard no screams or sounds of violence. It could have been two lovers having an argument, with no real aggression involved. And though I only heard one male voice, who’s to say that there were not more?

Anyway, it bothered me but I turned away. There wasn’t really anything I could do. What was I going to do? Phone the cops and tell them I heard voices, seemingly in some sort of argument? Yes, a man and a woman. No I don’t know where. No I don’t know what they were arguing about. No I didn’t see any weapons, nor see them either. Thanks a lot sir. Next time, maybe don’t bother huh? Wasting police time is a serious crime.

All of that leads me back to this contention, though, of Rosenthal’s that we all at one time or another have closed our ears and our hearts to those whom we might have helped. Now, he goes into pretty esoteric detail, comparing a murder in progress to children dying on the streets of India, where he worked for a while, and blaming himself, and by extension, all of humanity for being callous and uncaring. But I think there he’s doing himself an injustice. Of course, if you’re to include every beggar you passed without helping, every woman you met who seemed to have a black eye and you didn’t enquire, every homeless person you ignored, we’re all guilty. But there are levels, and to me that kind of thing is on a much lower level to the idea of actually turning away from the desperate cries of a dying woman in the night as she’s murdered almost beneath your window.

So as we will see,* we have over thirty-eight people involved in what I would call an evil act, though not one of them was involved. And that’s the problem as I see it. There was a murder, and out of thirty-eight people who could have done something to stop it, or at least alert the authorities, not one did.* I suppose in some ways it’s unfair to call this an evil act. It’s more a case of a lack of caring, but in the end, isn’t that evil in its own way? If you saw or heard someone being attacked right outside your door, or as you walked home, or in a car park, would you intervene? Well, no, you probably wouldn’t, and to an extent that’s understandable. You’d be one person. But this was… well, let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Let me first introduce you to the luckless future victim, both of a sadistic killer and of the cold-heartedness and callous disregard and disinterest of New Yorkers.


Catherine Susan “Kitty” Genovese (1935 - 1964)

Born only four days after Independence Day, Kitty Genovese was of Italian-American extraction, and lived in Brooklyn, New York. In perhaps a chilling foreshadowing of the end of her own life, her mother witnessed a murder ten years before her daughter would die under a madman’s knife, and it says the family moved after this, though whether that was as part of a witness protection deal or just because it was too stressful to remain there - or she feared for her life and those of her family - I don’t know. At any rate, that year was very significant, because it also became the year Kitty married and was subsequently separated from her husband of only a few months, when the marriage was annulled after she came out as a lesbian. So in one year, her family had moved from Brooklyn to Connecticut after her mother had suffered a horrible trauma in seeing someone killed (doesn’t say who, or under what circumstances), though she herself remained in Brooklyn,* fell in love, got married, realised she was not straight and got out of the marriage. A whole hell of a lot for a woman who had, unbeknownst to her, a mere decade of life left to live.

By the time the new decade had rolled around she had been working in bars in Queens, in fact though she was arrested for taking illegal bets at one, she later rose to manage another, and it was while in charge of this she would see out the final years of her life. She managed Ev’s Eleventh Hour Bar on Jamaica Avenue and 193rd Street in 1961, saving money towards her dream of opening an Italian restaurant, and two years later met her soulmate, Mary Ann Zeilonko, with whom she shared her Kew Gardens apartment on Austin Street. The romance was not to have a happy ending, obviously, as Kitty had less than a year to live.


Winston Moseley (1935 - 2016)

As I like to do, I mark the, to me, somewhat staggering coincidence that both victim and attacker were born in the same year, though Moseley would certainly outlive his victim, by a massive fifty years. There’s also only four months between their births, he born in March and she in July, and both were born in the first week of the month, he on March 2, she on July 7. A machinist married with three children and no criminal record, Winston Moseley seems to have had no motive for the attack, other than that he liked to kill people, or at least dominate and have power over them. He wasn’t especially fussy: he would attack men if he thought the victim was weak enough or he could surprise him, though generally he tended to just rob men whereas with women there was always the possibility of rape too, which he indulged in when he could. He did appear to have a predilection for killing his female victims though.

He did not just shadow his victims on the street, walking behind them, but often drove behind one if he saw her alone in her car. He would then park where she parked and follow her, attacking her on foot. This was the 1960s, and things like stalkers were unknown, but even so, Moseley does not appear to have been of that breed. He didn’t read up on, pick out and then check the routine of his victims so that he could be sure he would be able to get away with his terrible crimes. He was what I suppose today we would call a killer of opportunity; he almost literally fell across his victims by chance. Yes, he was out looking for a victim, but not anyone specific. A woman on her own, a drunk, someone smaller than him or looking lost, anyone he could intimidate, overpower and attack and either rob or kill would do. Women or men, it didn’t seem to make too much difference to him.

And yet, there was the sexual motive. It doesn’t look as if Moseley went out with sex on his mind. If he had done, then surely - assuming he was not bisexual, which I don’t know, but he was married - he would have no interest in male victims? As far as I can make out, he chose his victim and then if it was a woman and he had the chance he would rape her. Not exactly a criminal mastermind, but certainly a brutal, unprincipled killer without morals or pity, without any real plan and certainly with no remorse for any of his victims, as became clear later at his trial.

The small hours before dawn were Moseley’s preferred time for hunting, when the sky was dark and morning was yet hours away. Night time crowds from bars or nightclubs would have cleared off the streets and the only ones remaining would be solitary people, workers returning home, women coming back from a boyfriend’s apartment maybe, insomniacs. The brutality of the man is underlined through a previous murder, that of Anna May Johnson.

Anna May was killed on February 28, almost exactly two weeks before Kitty Genovese would meet her death. She was one of the ones Moseley tracked in her car, and when she stopped he got out and followed her. The time was 2 AM. Having been approached by Moseley for money, and presumably scared, Anna May handed over some cash. Moseley then shot her in the stomach. He shot her a second time, and certain she was dead, decided to rape her. He removed all her clothes but the night was cold and he didn’t fancy doing it in the cold, so instead, having shot her just outside her apartment block, he took her into it where he laid her on the living room floor and had his way. He then dragged her up the stairs to her apartment, set it on fire and left.

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Trollheart: Signature-free since April 2018

Trollheart

Where Everyone Knows Your Name and Ignores Your Cries

At approximately 2:30 AM on March 13 1964 Kitty Genovese locked up the bar and climbed into her red FIAT, heading home to her apartment in Kew Gardens. She arrived about 3:15, having been spotted by Winson Moseley at a traffic light as he sat in his car awaiting a victim. He followed her, and sticking to his MO, when she parked he did too and approached her. She naturally got spooked and was heading for a telephone box to call the police when he grabbed her and stabbed her. With her first scream, a light went on in one of the apartments in the block opposite the bookstore where she had been attacked. A man shouted out at the assailant who walked off, but the caller shut his window and turned his lights back off. Moseley returned and stabbed Kitty again.

Screaming out that she had been mortally wounded, Kitty struggled along the street as lights went on in the apartments around her, but nobody else shouted or looked out. Moseley, seeing the unwelcome interest being taken in his activities, went to his car and drove off, but when the lights all went out and nobody offered any help to the dying woman, he returned, found Kitty slumped near her door, stabbed her again, finishing the job. He took her money and left. He was so unconcerned about what he had done that he committed another three burglaries before the police caught him.

This is his testimony, taken from the police interview after he was arrested, and reprinted in the book Thirty-Eight Witnesses:

Q: Now, on this night did you intend killing?
A: Yes.
Q: What if anything did you do to prepare for that?
A: Well, I had a hunting knife that I had taken from a previous burglary, and I took that with me.
Q: Had you any specific type of individual in mind?
A: Well, I knew it would be a woman.
Q: Is there any reason why now you intended to kill a white woman as distinguished from the two prior times that you thought you killed colored?
A: No, unless perhaps I might have been thinking there might have been some difference between them.
Q: Now tell us what you did, please.
A: Well, I left the house about one-thirty or two o'clock, and it took me until about three o'clock to find one that was driving where I could actually catch up with her. . . . I followed [her red car] for about ten blocks, and then it pulled into what I thought was a parking lot.
Q: Did you make your mind up to kill her?
A: Yes.
Q: Can you tell us any reasons why?
A: No, I can't give you any reasons why.
The court: Was [money] one of the factors?
A: It possibly was, but it was not a primary factor.
Q: You tell us exactly what happened, Winston.
A: As soon as she got out of the car she saw me and ran. I ran after her and I had a knife in my hand, then I caught up with her and I stabbed her twice in the back.

He testified that he stabbed her in the chest and stomach as well as the back, that somebody called out the window, but that he "did not think that person would come down to help her."
Moseley also testified that later he had heard somebody open an apartment door and shout down, but he "didn't feel these people" were coming down the stairs. So he lifted her skirt, cut off her under-clothes, including her brassiere. After he had stabbed her repeatedly he began to worry that somebody might have seen his car and noted the color, make, or license. So he walked back to the outdoor parking lot where he had left it to stalk her on foot. He moved the car around the corner. Then he took off his hat, a stocking cap, and put on a fedora he had in the car.

Q: [from the prosecutor] Why?
A: Well, I felt that perhaps if I had not killed the* girl and had to leave what I started unfinished, she would have only seen the bottom half of my face.
Q: In other words, you thought you could disguise your face better by putting on a different hat.
A: That's right.
Q: Now, when you came back, you were thinking, weren't you, about what you were going to do?
A: That's right.
Q: What?
A: That's right.

Moseley said he heard some yelling from windows, but it had stopped by the time he got back to Catherine Genovese, whom he had left lying in the street. He did not think that anybody would come down "regardless to the fact that she had screamed. So I came back but I didn't see her. . . . I tried the first door in the row of those back houses, which was locked. The second door was open and she was in there. As soon as she saw me she started screaming so I stabbed her a few other times . . . once in the neck. . . . She only moaned after that."

Q: You also knew that people at three o'clock in the morning on a cold morning would not take the trouble to even come down and investigate if someone had been killed?
A: I thought that way, yes. Q: And as she started to scream, you stabbed her, didn't you?
A: Yes, I did.
Q: You stabbed her in the throat?
A: Right.
Q: That is where the voice was coming from, isn't that right?
A: That's right.

Moseley testified that he saw that she was exposed, decided to rape her, stabbed her again, that she kept moaning, that he took off one of his gloves to pull down his zipper, took out his penis, laid on top of her but could not attain—"What was the word?" he asked the judge. "Erection," said the court. Did he have an orgasm, the court asked. Moseley said yes. He also said she was menstruating at the time. He took the money from her wallet.

Q: Forty-nine dollars you put in your pocket, hah?
A: That's being practical.
Q: Being practical?
A: Yes. Why would I throw money away?

The Aftermath

I think that last line speaks very well to Moseley’s state of mind. Is there any of us who - assuming we were able to murder and rape a woman - would even think of robbing her too? It shows, for me, the attempt, even if unconscious, to depersonalise his victim. She is nobody’s sister, nobody’s mother (well, she wasn’t either of these things, but he didn’t know that), nobody’s lover, nobody’s wife, nobody’s daughter. Just a corpse, a victim, a mound of flesh he could use to satisfy his evil urges having deprived the woman it was of life, and in that frame of mind, I suppose, why not take her money? It’s not as if she was going to be needing it.

But no matter how horrified we might feel at this killer’s cold attitude towards the woman who was only moments ago* a living and breathing human being with hopes and desires and fears,* and dreams, that can be put down to the fact that he was a sociopath and a killer, and did in fact plead insanity at his trial. The attitude of the onlookers, however, those people, those thirty-eight men and women, all of whom could have been in the same position as Kitty Genovese, who watched and listened to the attack and did nothing, that is harder to explain away.

But before I get to that, what of the killer?

Well, he was indeed apprehended. He doesn’t come across as a man who took any particular care to disguise his crimes; he killed Kitty Genovese out in the open, and it’s only due to the apathy of New Yorkers, or those ones anyway, that he wasn’t interrupted and caught. Did he know they wouldn’t interfere or investigate? Was he banking on that, or was it just, for him, a welcome happenstance? Whatever the case, he was caught but not before the New York Police went the usual route of checking Kitty’s lover out. Being 1964, though lesbianism was known of it would hardly have been that much in the mainstream, and as ever, those who are different are frowned upon by those who consider themselves “normal” or “straight”, with the result that Mary Ann Zielonko was questioned by the cops as a suspect, the idea being, I assume, that they believed some sort of lovers’ tiff was responsible. This, of course, despite Kitty screaming “He stabbed me!”

For over six hours Zielonko was interrogated, with I would imagine the minimum of finesse and sensitivity, and almost certainly by male cops, as I doubt too many female police were in the ranks at this time, certainly no detectives. A very large percentage of men seem to have an even bigger grudge against lesbians, as if they are somehow reducing the pool from which straight men have to pick women. Also, if a lesbian is good-looking or pretty, the oft-used and bitter comment of “what a waste!” tends to paint these women as going against nature, almost deliberately to deny men their god-given right over women. Yeah, I see now that it was all male cops.

Six days later, and having had no luck with the case (with presumably Mary Ann exonerated or at least unable to be tied to the crime) the cops had the blindest bit of luck when Moseley, in the commission of a robbery, was stopped by a neighbour who then called the police. His car was identified as the one seen at the murder scene, and he quickly confessed. This is insane. Sure it was night, but thirty-eight people witnessed the attack and yet the cops could not find, and seemingly did not even look for (no mention of an APB) a white Chevy Corvair, not exactly an inconspicuous car. Had it not been for the robbery attempt and a neighbour - ironically - actually taking an interest in the theft and calling the police - they might still have been looking. Or even not looking: I don’t know how much if any priority was given to this case, and I suspect little really.

Moseley’s trial took just over a week. His initial plea of not guilty was changed to not guilty by reason of insanity. He pled guilty to two other murders, that of already mentioned Anna May Johnson and another girl, Barbara Kralik, though another man, already charged with this murder, was later convicted of it, despite Moseley’s later testimony in his defence. After seven hours the jury brought in a verdict of guilty and Moseley was sentenced to death. This sentence was later commuted to life imprisonment, due to the issue of his being insane not having been taken into account at the trial.

Wait, what? He pled not guilty by reason of insanity, didn’t he? So how could it be said he was not… oh. Apparently the idea was that he was convicted as a sane man and the insanity plea was not taken into account. ****ing appeal court. Well, he did die eventually, having been refused parole a staggering eighteen times, never showing any remorse for the murders and pretending now that he had never meant to kill Kitty, which clearly his interview shows he had. After serving a total of fifty-two years in prison, he died at the age of 81.

They Also (De)Serve Who Only Stand and Watch

So one stain was removed from the world, but another, deeper one remains. What of the people who stood idly by while a young woman was killed only yards from their doors? When questioned, most of these mumbled hard-to-accept excuses, such as “didn’t want to get involved”, “was afraid” or even, in one really incredibly selfish case, “too tired.” Some of them professed they could offer no explanation for why they did not intervene, or at least make a call, while others closed the door in the faces of enquiries. Poor explanations such as the belief that it could be a domestic incident (sure: where someone stabs someone) or that they didn’t really hear don’t wash with me. Even the idea that perhaps the fact that Kitty was a lesbian feeding into a general poor opinion of the woman makes little sense: nobody could see or hear enough to know who was being attacked, just that someone was.

The police groaned that had just one person called them sooner - someone did eventually call, but it was after the attack, and too later, as Kitty died on the way to hospital - her life could have been saved. There is evidence to suggest that much of the reluctance to call the police stemmed from either a distrust of the force or the feeling that the caller would be dealt with in a less than polite manner. Reactions all more or less along the lines of “don’t bother us” and “what do you expect us to do?” seem to have been common, and the idea that people would open themselves up to ridicule and even abuse seems to have some basis in truth. As well as this, the dearth of patrol cars cruising New York seems to have been an issue, as does the often inordinately long wait time to get through to the police (911 had not yet been instigated in New York, so callers had to go through the operator) - often up to forty-five minutes. Based on that, if someone had called the moment Kitty had first screamed, the killer would have had time to finish her off and rape her and vanish before the call had even been answered!

The incident attained a certain notoriety, turning from a “simple, commonplace” murder to a question of citywide and then national proportions, the troubling syndrome of the uncaring neighbours. In a world where people used to be able to call on those they lived nearby for help, the world had turned one-eighty and now people shut themselves in and metaphorically put their fingers in their ears, not wanting to hear anything that might require them to take action, even if that action did not involve any danger to themselves. In the six days between the murder and the apprehension of Moseley, I wonder did many of those people consider what might happen if the killer struck again? What would they feel like if their wife or girlfriend, or they themselves were the one bleeding out in the dark, crying in the night, hearing nothing but silence and seeing nothing but dark windows?

Mention must be made of four people: one, the man who at least opened his window and shouted at Moseley to leave “that girl alone”, even if all he did was that, and then went back to bed. It has to be allowed that at least he spooked the killer sufficiently to have him walk off, even if he swiftly returned when it was clear the man was not coming down nor had phoned the police. Second is Sophia Farrar, a neighbour and close friend of Kitty’s, who found her after the second attack and stayed with her until the ambulance arrived. The man who did - eventually, and too late - phone the cops, and finally, perhaps most damningly of all, Karl Ross, who was so unsure and scared of what to do - including whether or not he should call the police - that he delayed and wasted precious minutes while he debated his decision with friends on the phone he could have been using to alert the police. There’s no record as to whether he actually grew a pair and made the call, but he certainly made sure to protect himself first.

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Trollheart: Signature-free since April 2018

Trollheart

The Rest is Silence: Apathy and Antipathy

In the aftermath of the murder, and as it grew to become much more than that, a symbol, if you like, of man’s apathy, of city living, of isolationism and insulation, of, as UB40* once sang, “a reminder of a world that doesn’t care”, the usual talking heads appeared out of the woodwork, like, um, well, let’s be nice and say bees to honey, but you know what I mean. Psychiatrists, priests, talk show hosts, doctors, professors all tried to explain - as they could not - the reason that thirty-eight people had stood metaphorically with their hands in their pockets while below them in the unforgiving dark streets a woman was cruelly robbed of her life. The words “shame”, “fear” and “disbelief” were bandied about, but the real buzz-word that stuck, and which came to forever crystallise the feelings behind this incident, was apathy. Quite literally, and I have no intention of being as forgiving and understanding as Mr. Rosenthal seems to be in his book, nobody gave a ****. Deep in their hearts, somewhere in their souls, did they know a woman was being murdered? I think they did, but they convinced themselves either that it was not that bad, or that if it was, it was nothing to do with them.

I wonder how they lived with themselves? Some are likely still alive. I was born in 1963 and some of these neighbours may have been young enough, so do they think about their shared act of cowardice and inaction even now? Does it still haunt them? Have they encountered, in their lives, similar incidents, opportunities where they could speak up, intervene, make a difference, maybe save a life, and if so, have they? Or have they again turned away, having learned nothing from the past, again thinking, selfishly, cowardly, nothing to do with me, don’t want to get involved? And has society progressed any further in the intervening sixty years? Is it likely that, should some girl - or man - be murdered in plain view of witnesses, anywhere in the world, not just New York, the same apathy, irrational fear and desire to stay out of it would prevail? Most likely, the best you’d get these days is people studiously videoing it with their phones, maybe putting that footage online. Might help the police to track down the killer, but it wouldn’t do much for the victim.

It seems the answer is no, it didn’t change anything. Ten years later, in the same apartment complex - but inside this time - a woman was battered to death on Christmas morning. Again, neighbours heard the violent beating but did nothing. Sandra Zahler however would not become the Kitty Genovese for the 1970s as her predecessor had been the tragic poster girl for public apathy and cold-heartedness and selfish self-interest of the 1960s. I don’t quite know why, unless it’s the old “second-time syndrome”, that something shocking happens and everyone takes notice, but if and when it happens again, the impact is somehow lessened, maybe because it’s no longer a complete surprise. It could also be due to there being a subtle difference in her death, in that it took place in an apartment, and so the witnesses would have had more of a case by claiming they believed it to be domestic violence, which the police would be probably reluctant to get involved in. At any rate, no stories seem to have persisted about Ms. Zahler and her name has not gone down in history as has that of Kitty Genovese. That doesn’t mean it’s any less a crime, but like I say, it had happened before.

The fact that it did happen again, and in the same area, for me points a constant and unwavering finger at these residents. In some way, maybe you could say anyone might have done what they did - or in fact didn’t do - in the early* hours of* March 13 1964, but to have it happen a second time, with the same result is I think stretching their excuse a little thin. These were clearly people - possibly the same people; we’re only talking about ten years later - who simply had no intention of getting “involved”, and obviously whatever mark, if any, had been left on them by the Genovese killing had either worn off by now or had never had any real effect anyway.

The overall reaction, perhaps oddly, perhaps not, certainly among the inhabitants of Queens, to the Kitty Genovese murder was to “just forget it” and “what happened, happened.” Rather than, as you might expect, exhibiting shame or remorse or guilt, these people all seemed, if you can believe it, angry. Not angry at the murderer. Not angry that a young woman lost her life. Not angry at themselves. But angry at two selected targets: the police, whom they claimed “did nothing anyway so why bother calling” - an attitude you’d have to wonder if they would retain should they be in need of assistance themselves? - and the newspapers, who were “making things hard for them.”

Good. So they should have. It should be hard. It should always be hard. Shame and self-doubt and remorse won’t come if things like this - a crime, virtually, as far as I’m concerned, and this one perpetrated by Kitty Genovese’s neighbours in all but an attempt at cover up of her murder - are quietly swept under the rug and let fade away. It has to be hard. It should never be easy to turn away, to hear the scream in the night, the cry for help, the plea for aid and close the window, settling back gruffly as the shiver of unregarded guilt travels down the shoulders and back, trying to urge us to action, as we open our newspaper or return to the television, deploring the news stories.

Once it becomes easy, even normal, to avoid the suffering and refuse to help our fellow human beings, it’s over. We are no longer, as Dickens once put it, a single race of men, all passengers on the same journey to the grave, but are self-isolated watchers who will be happy to witness a murder and lift not a finger to help. Our humanity will be gone, and though she did not choose to die for this reason, or any reason, Kitty Genovese’s brutal and sad and shocking death will no longer have any* meaning, and will have been for nothing.

We can’t allow that to happen.

What shall it profit a man if he gains the whole world but loses his soul?

That is, indeed, the question.

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Trollheart

Death on the Border: The Night the Music Died
The Murder of the Miami Showband

Timeline: 1975

Okay, fine, we’re back to murder again, and I said I wouldn’t be doing only murder. Though technically, the last article really concentrated more on the apathy of bystanders and the murder was almost a side-issue, though not quite. This time, though, it’s pure murder, pure evil, pure and simple. But not only that. It’s perhaps the worst kind of murder, that of innocents. The flames of sectarian hatred and bigotry have been burning in Ireland, on both sides of the religious divide, for well over a thousand years now. Think about that for a moment. Just let it sink in. For half of Christianity, Ireland has been at war with itself, or to be more accurate, with the invaders. In the 12th century King Henry II arrived in Ireland to put down a rebellion, and since then, though the British presence has left our country relatively recently (end of last century) the abiding and eternal distrust, fear and hatred between Catholics and Protestants goes on, mostly across the border, and not with quite as much vehemence and far less violence than it used to, but the march of the Twelfth, when Protestants through the Orange Order celebrate the victory of William of Orange at the Battle of the Boyne, is still a sore point for Republicans, the fact that the route of the march is through staunchly nationalist areas not helping.

The IRA, though technically disbanded, have resurfaced since the Good Friday Agreement, and most recently are being seen in a new, splinter group calling itself, um, the New IRA. Very original. Bombs and shootings and kidnappings are no longer the order of the day in Northern Ireland, and “The Troubles”, as over three decades of virtual civil war in the North is referred to, are over. But old enmities die hard, and there are still those who wish to continue the struggle for Irish independence, though that once noble goal has long, long ago ceased to have any meaning and is now just used as an excuse to kill “Brits and Prods”, and was, for a very long time, also responsible for very indiscriminate bombings and shootings which invariably took the lives of Catholics as well as Protestants, just about all of them innocent.

Like the five lads from Dublin who came up for a gig across the border, and most of whom returned in wooden boxes, the others shaken, shocked and changed forever. I suppose it could be said, in hindsight, why did they drive over the border, knowing the state of things there? Was their music that important? Maybe ask Rory Gallagher, who never failed to play the Belfast Queens Hall whenever he toured, even at the height of The Troubles. But sure, you could say, naive to believe they would not attract unwelcome attention. Can you say though that they deserve to die for that?

Which Side Are You On: A Brief History of the Troubles

Always amazes me how low-key and understated we are. Others might have called this a period of civil war, guerilla warfare, maybe the Struggle? But we go with the bland-sounding Troubles, which hardly conjures up the kind of images we would get sadly used to seeing certainly in my lifetime: bombed-out buildings, shops, burned, twisted wreckage of cars, dark stains on the street, ribbons wound round lampposts and bins, flowers left at the scenes of too many deaths. We became so used to it that even on the Irish news, nuacht, which was in Irish, I came to know a phrase - “pleasch buma” (flay-isk booma) which was almost always in the reports. It meant, a bomb exploded. It was so commonplace to hear of deaths, maimings and explosions in “the North” that we, to our shame, shrugged and said, oh, another one.

As I already said, and as you’ll see if you read or have read my History of Ireland journal, the occupation of Ireland by the English goes back over 800 years, but always the main target for what became known as the Ascendancy - Protestant settlers from England and Scotland - was the North, the province of Ulster. Originally the fiercest hold-out against the English, it later became, in the wake of Irish independence and the perceived rise to power of the Catholic majority in the south, the new Republic of Ireland, the remaining bastion of English, now British, power. Mostly because the Ascendancy were all Protestants, and they had no wish for a united Ireland, so when the Republic was declared - originally the Free State, but let’s not get into that now - they voted to remain staunchly loyal to the Crown.

After the signing of the Anglo-Irish Treaty in 1921, which created the Free State of Ireland, and the ensuing two years of civil war, Ulster exercised its option not to join, and to remain part of the United Kingdom. Catholics would have had little input into this decision, as the parliament was run by Protestants, despite Catholic Emancipation having been achieved a hundred years earlier. Traditionally, Catholics had been treated as second-class citizens in Ulster, and now with the emergence of the Free State, the Ascendancy feared they were about to take their revenge and join with their brothers and sisters in the South. This also stemmed in part from the fact that, after much to-ing and fro-ing, and a lot of gerrymandering, the six counties which would - and still do - comprise Northern Ireland were deliberately skewed so as to provide the largest Unionist majority possible, resulting in Catholics making up less than 35% of the new region.

But that was still too large a Catholic population for their liking, and with campaigns by the IRA (Irish Republican Army duh) across the border in the late 50s and early 60s, and violence exploding with the formation of the Ulster Volunteer Force, who declared “war” on the IRA and its supporters (basically any Catholics), battle lines were drawn. Both sides engaged in atrocities, from the killing of civilians to the bombing of police barracks, to indiscriminate attacks on peaceful marches by the RUC, or Royal Ulster Constabulary, almost all of whom were Protestant, so guess what march they attacked?

Things began to seriously escalate when RUC officers entered and attacked without any provocation the Catholic area of Bogside in Derry, and the resignation of Prime Minister Terence O’Neill, seen by hardline Unionists as being too soft on Catholics. Back in Dublin, the fiftieth anniversary of the Easter Rising saw the destruction of a hated British landmark, as Nelson’s Column in O’Connell Street was blown up by the IRA, and not a tear shed I would think. However all of this led to increased fear across the border that the IRA were preparing for a new offensive in an attempt to force Ulster into the Republic.


The Battle of the Bogside: Brothers and Sisters of Ireland! To the Barricades!

The Battle of the Bogside took place on August 12 1969 when loyalist marchers passing by the Bogside area of Derry were attacked, and the RUC responded with disproportionate force, resulting in over 1,000 people being wounded, and over 490 of their own. As it became clear the police had no real training to prosecute such a riot as the Bogside was becoming - with the place being pronounced “Free Derry” (as opposed to the British/Unionist Londonderry) and standing as a symbol of nationalist resistance to the UK Government and to the Unionists - the British Army were sent in. Initially they acted more as observers, refusing to cross the barricades that had been set up by the Bogside residents, and patrolling the border of “Free Derry” only, making it a no-go area as the RUC withdrew. This of course would not last, and marked the arrival of British troops in Northern Ireland, spelling very bad news for Catholics.

It should be noted that though the Irish Taoiseach (tee-shock; Prime Minister) at the time, Jack Lynch, warned of the Republic getting involved and threatened to send the Irish Army in (I’m sure the Brits were quaking!) nothing came of his threats, which turned out to be bluster. Lynch knew the last thing the new Republic, barely twenty years old at the time, needed was to attempt to take on the might of the British Army and the Crown, so he paid lipservice to support for the Bogside and Catholics in Northern Ireland, but basically shuffled away with his hands in his pockets, unwilling to commit Ireland to a full-scale war in which she would have been very quickly annihilated and no doubt reabsorbed back into the United Kingdom.

The riot in Derry had of course found itself mirrored by its contemporaries throughout nationalist Ulster, and though the Battle of the Bogside ended after four days, the unrest resulted in over 1,500 Catholic families being forced or deciding to flee to the border, where the Irish Army set up a camp at Gormanston for what could only then be described as refugees in their own country. The two opposing areas of the Falls Road (Republican) and Shankill (Loyalist) were divided by an actual wall, constructed by the newly-arrived British Army, laughingly called the Peace Wall, so as to keep the two fierce enemy communities separate.

In October, when a report recommended disarming the RUC and disbanding the hated B-Specials, the Ulster Special Constabulary, loyalists rioted and the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) carried out a series of bombings across the border in the Republic. The British Army would soon find its role as impartial peacekeepers would have to change, and they would be forced to take a side, this inevitably being on that of the Unionists. When the government introduced internment without trial, over 350 Catholics were imprisoned in what would today be considered a police state; no due process, no evidence, no presumption of innocence, a real case of “Catholic as charged”, and of course this led to many non-violent people who had been imprisoned becoming radicalised and ready to fight for the nationalist cause. By 1975 the number of detainees would reach almost 2,000. Attacks by loyalist paramilitaries on Catholics were completely ignored by the British Army, and internment was supported by the British government.

And then came Bloody Sunday.

Bloody Sunday: January 30 1972

Also known as the Bogside Massacre, but generally recognised as Bloody Sunday, if there was a nadir in the relationship between the British Army and the nationalist population of Northern Ireland, there could not be a more striking delineator. The chances are that perhaps, even if you live in the States, you’ve seen footage of this: a man in a black suit - a priest - with a hat crouching down and waving a white handkerchief as he attempts to lead other unarmed Catholics to safety. For us, this image became as iconic, as emblematic of the Troubles as, say, the raising of the US flag on Iwo Jima, or the lone man standing facing the Chinese tank in Tiananmen Square, or the painting of the last stand of General Custer at the Little Big Horn. In that one image is encapsulated all the brutality, senselessness and sectarianism of the Troubles. A moment caught forever in time, it freezes the blood when you know the story behind it.

And here it is.

To some extent I guess you can say it sort of went back to where it all began. The Bogside in Derry had been, as already outlined, the turning point for the British Government, when the then-Prime Minister had requested military assistance to deal with the riots which had broken out between residents and the RUC, and the Army had once again come to Northern Ireland. Since then, Derry, or “Free Derry” had become a hotbed of Republican resistance to Unionist rule and a vocal - and physical - opponent of internment. Daily clashes took place between British Army soldiers and nationalists at the barricades previously erected by the residents, which had made “Free Derry” a no-go area both for the RUC and the Army.

As usual, the problem had its roots in a march, but that’s only half the story.

As one of his last acts as the final Northern Ireland Prime Minister, Brian Faulkner banned all marches through the province for the year of 1972. This was mostly due to the perceived provocation of the Apprentice Boys who marched on the Twelfth of August (known simply as “The Twelfth”) to commemorate the victory at the Battle of the Boyne. However with internment disproportionately aimed at Catholics, a march was planned in defiance of the ban, and went ahead, resulting in major injuries to the protesters, mostly unarmed but throwing stones and bottles, as the British paratroopers fired rubber bullets at them and then waded in. Allegations of brutality and overzealous violence were levelled at the paratroopers, but who was going to stop them?

Undaunted - certainly bloodied but unbowed - the protesters set up a second march, this to take place on the last day of January. This was given reluctant approval, given the events of the previous fortnight, but with restrictions. The commander of the Army in Northern Ireland, General Robert Ford, decided - poorly, it would seem, considering how violent they had already been - to use the paratroopers from the same regiment (1 Para) that had stopped the march on January 18, to arrest anyone seen to be trying to go past the limit, set as Guildhall Square, where Parliament sat. The crowd has been estimated to have been between 10,000 and 15,000.

On seeing their route to the city hall blocked, leader Ivan Hall MP diverted the march, heading towards Free Derry Corner, but some of the marchers began throwing stones at the soldiers. When paratroopers began opening fire from an abandoned building, in response to missiles thrown up at them, it wasn’t rubber bullets they were using. Just after four o’clock the order was given to arrest the rioters, but contrary to what he had been told, the commander of the paras made no distinction between peaceful marchers and rioters, and as they chased everyone through the streets in armoured cars and on foot, the same brutality was in evidence as the troopers made it clear they were not in any way impartial, and took their anger out on the marchers.

As the routed marchers reached the barricades at the Bogside, the paratroopers opened fire, killing six people - all unarmed - and wounding another. The picture which commemorates the attack shows Jackie Duddy, who had been sheltering alongside a priest, and was shot in the back, as the priest, Father Edward Daly, tries to get him and the others with him to safety, his flag of surrender and his status as a priest, both clearly visible, ignored by the army. In the space of ten minutes, thirteen people had been shot dead (a fourteenth would die of his wounds a few months later) and twelve injured (not counting the man who later died). None were armed, and so it will come as no surprise that the paratroopers sustained no injuries, and certainly none of them were killed.

After what can only be described as the massacre, and surely bringing to mind the one which became known as Peterloo a century previously, the bodies of the dead were callously and unceremoniously dumped into armoured personnel carriers by the paratroopers, with no more regard than if they had been the corpses of animals.

As expected, the British Parliament backed up the paratroopers’ story that they had fired at armed men, despite much photographic evidence confirming the opposite, and the fact that almost every fatality on Bloody Sunday had been shot in the back, and therefore hardly a threat if running away, while two people were - surely deliberately and with great callousness - shot in the face as they went to the aid of a third. To nobody’s surprise, Commander Lifford, who had directed the massacre, far from being removed from command or censured, was awarded the OBE by the Queen. In Ireland, a national day of mourning was observed and during a furious protest outside the British Embassy in Dublin the place was burned to the ground, though not with anyone in it. Irish Minister for Foreign Affairs, Patrick Hillary (later to be President of Ireland) went to the United Nations Security Council, demanding a UN peacekeeping force be deployed to Northern Ireland. Never happened of course.

An initial, rushed, and certainly whitewashed enquiry a few months later supported the actions of the paratroopers, but everyone in Ireland knew this was bollocks, however the British would not acknowledge the truth for another forty years, when in 2010 the results of the later, Saville Enquiry, were made public. This report was damning against the paratroopers, supporting the contention that everyone killed was unarmed, shot while running away, and further, that evidence that had been given to the original Widgery Enquiry had been false, and that the Ministry of Defence had done all they could to impede the Saville Enquiry.

In response to both the violence of Bloody Sunday and the subsequent IRA reprisals, including an attack on an army barracks that killed seven soldiers, and believing Stormont (the Northern Irish Parliament) incapable of maintaining order and dealing with the situation, the British Government dissolved it and ruled direct from Westminster, installing a Secretary of State for Northern Ireland In Belfast. This was the first time any part of the island had come under direct British rule since the Treaty in 1921, and represented a tightening of the grip on power of hardline Unionists, and the further disenfranchisement of Catholics, as history went backwards for them; Daniel O’Connell need not have been born. The barricades at “Free Derry”, a direct challenge to the new total British rule, were dismantled and the Bogside ceased to be a no-go area.

In 1973 the new Northern Ireland Assembly was created, a supposedly bipartisan parliament which would allow “power-sharing”, proportionate representation from both Unionists and nationalists, but of course, put two lions in the one cage and you’re asking for trouble. The Unionists saw the new Stormont as nothing more than a veiled attempt to move towards their most feared result, a united Ireland, while the nationalists were not interested in dealing with their hated enemy, and anyway a united Ireland was their stated goal, and always had be. The word compromise was not in the dictionary of either side. The agreement was dead within the year, on the back of, among other things, a general strike by Unionists and a concerted campaign of bombing attacks by the UVF in the Republic.

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