THE MENENDEZ MURDERS-Robert Rand

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beauty queen wife. They're two sons on the fast track to success, but it was all a facade. The killing of Jose and Kitty Menendez on a quiet Sunday evening in Beverly Hills didn't make the cover of People magazine until the arrest of their sons seven months later, and

the case developed an intense cult following. When the first Menendez trial began in July nineteen ninety three, the public was convinced that Lyle and Eric were a pair of greedy, rich kids who had killed loving the voted parents, but the real story remained buried underneath years of dark secrets until now. Journalist Robert Wren, who originally reported on the case for the Miami Herald and Playboy, has followed the Menendez murders from the beginning and has continued investigating and

interviewing key sources for twenty eight years. Rand is the only reporter who covered the original investigation as well as both trials. With unparalleled access to the Menendez family and their history, including interviews with both brothers before and after their arrest, Rand has uncovered extraordinary details that certainly would have changed the fate of the brother's first degree murder

conviction and sentencing to life without parole. Rand shares these intimate, never before revealed findings, including a deeply disturbing history of child abuse and sexual emolestation in the Menendez family going back generations, and the shocking admission O. J. Simpson made to one of the Menendez brothers when they were inmates

at the La County Men's Central Jail. The book that we're featuring this evening is The Menendez Murders, The shocking, untold story of the Menendez Family and the killings that stunned the nation, With my special guest journalist and author Robert Rand. Welcome to the program and thank you very much for greeing this interview.

was an enormous business in the nineteen eighties. And the morning after Jose and Kitty died, I received a phone call in the newsroom at the Miami Herald from a friend of mine, Steve Apple, who was the editor of a trade magazine for the video business, and he told me that a high profile home video executive, Jose Menendez, and his wife had been blown away the previous evening in Beverly Hills, and I knew that. I quickly found out that Jose Menendez was Cuban American, and so that

made it a potential interest to people in Miami. And the initial media coverage of the Menendez murders was really only on the national media radar for two or three days after the murders, and then it just there was some local LA coverage. There were seven months between the night of the murders and March eighth, nineteen ninety, when Lyle Menendez was arrested in Beverly Hills.

up the sister, Jose Menendez and called her up. And my call was five percent to make a condolence call and ninety five percent to possibly hit on her for a story. And after I introduced myself, Marta Cano, the aunt of Eric and Linel Menendez, immediately invited me to come up to West Palm Beach and meet her, and we spent four hours that afternoon discussing the Menenda's family history, which was a fascinating story. The family originally was from Spain.

They had been very poor, became wealthy, lost everything, immigrated to Cuba, had no money, became successful, wealthy all over again, and then Castro came into power and they had to leave Cuba and the family restarted for a third time in the States. Jose Menendus arrived in the US at

the age of sixteen. He had nothing. He had been leading a country club lifestyle, upper middle class, very comfortable lifestyle in Cuba, and suddenly he was living with distant relatives in an attic in northeast Pennsylvania, and once again in the States, the family became successful all over again.

So I went back to my editor at the Tropic magazine Sunny Magazine of the Herald and said, look, we don't know much about this murder investigation, and the police were being very tight, but I said, but I said, this family has a very interesting story, and so I think we should do a biography of Jose Menendez Rags to Rich's Cuban American story ends in a terrible tragedy. And my editor liked that idea, and I began my initial reporting on the case.

spent a lot of time with them. You know, he initially he was interested in them becoming competitive swimmers, and then he switched his focus and the folks and the brothers to tennis, and both brothers became nationally ranked tennis players. Was Aman used to wake them up at four in the morning and have them hit balls for three hours before they would go to school.

of your parents. And so Jose and Kitty Menendez Elope went to Indiana and didn't tell their family until after

they were married. His father was somewhat upset. His father, whose nickname was Peppine his real name was also Jose, But Jose Men's father told them, you're too young to get married, and you know you shouldn't do this, but Jose had made up his mind decided he wanted to do it, and the young couple did get married, and then the family was happy after they kept the secrets for a few months, but the family was happy after everything came out.

door to door. There was one anecdote I heard from the family in which he sold encyclopedia to a woman, an elderly woman, who after the day the evening after he sold it to her, he felt guilty. He didn't think she could really afford it, and he went back the next day and you took the encyclopedia back and gave refunded the woman her money. He was also working as a dishwasher at the twenty one Club in New York,

and so they were really struggling financially. Jose graduated from Queen's College and was able to land the job with Cooper's what was then Cooper's Library and one of the big eight accounting firms, and from there he went through a couple other jobs as an executive with different companies, and then one of the biggest jobs in his career was when he became head of US operations for Hurtz Rannakar.

And after a couple of years of success as Hurts RCA, the corporate owner moved Jose to one of the top executives with RCA Records, and so Jose was hoping to become the top executive, the CEO of RCA Records, and when that didn't happen, he pulled the cord on a golden parachute, walked away with a million dollars and began looking for some type of new work in the entertainment business. And one of the offers that came his way was to run the home video division of Cara Coole Pictures.

Care Cole Pictures was one of the hottest independent studios in the nineteen eighties. They released the Rambo movies starring Sylvester Stallone. They released the famous Sharon Stone movie Basic Instinct, and in the nineteen eighties the home video divisions had become a gold mine for the studios. It was a new business. It was really kind of found money and that's the way people were consuming movies long before streaming. People had, you know, home had VCRs beta machines in

their homes and played movies. And so Jose and Kitty Menendez had lived in Princeton, New Jersey for twenty years with their sons, Eric and Lyle, and they picked up the family and moved out to California. At one point, Jose Menendez talked with his wife Kitty and suggested that he and Eric come out to California and the Kitty

and Lyle stay in Princeton. Lyle was about to start school at Princeton University and Kitty man and this was very involved in charitable groups and the community activities, but she quickly turned that down. So the entire family moved to Los Angeles, and initially for a year and a half they lived in the La suburb of Calabasas, which nobody had heard of in nineteen eighty nine on a national international level. But of course we've since, you know, known Calabasas as the home of the Kardashians.

lived down the street from Menanda's. The two families were very close, and so for Kitty Menendaz, the idea of uprooting her life and moving to California after twenty years in Priston was really something she was not She did not really want to do that, but at a certain point, after some friction between I was saying Kitty, she did agree to move to Los Angeles. As I said, the family lived in Calabasas for about a year and a half and then Eric Menendez was involved in a fight

at Calabasas High School. Eric was a star player on the Calabasas High tennis team and one day some members of the tennis team became involved in a fight with some gang members and there were some threats being made against the Menenda's family, and so that was one of the that Jose and Kitty decided to move to Beverly Hills and they purchased a mansion on the North Elm Drive in the fall of nineteen eighty eight and made that move to Beverly Hills.

within the family. But there was another incident that took place in which Eric was involved in some burglaries in Calabasas, which he committed with a close friend and they were and actually Eric Menandez the first burgulary he was involved in the house where they committed the burglary was the home of the parents of a friend of Eric's and another friend of his who was involved in the burglary,

Craig Signarelli, and the parents were out of town. They were in Europe on vacation, and Eric's friend whose parents were out of town, actually gave Eric and Craig the combination to his parents safe and they took quite a bit of property out of the house and include property

worth about one hundred thousand dollars. And so then they decided to do a second burglary, and Lyle Menendas was very upset when he heard about this and he didn't want He was also concerned about the relationship between Eric Menendez and his best friend, Craig Signorelli. So Lyle actually was involved in a second burglary with Eric and overall and again this was the house of the parents of a friend of Eric Menenda's and overall over one hundred thousand.

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as a juvenile. And most of the property was returned and Jose Menendez were a check to cover the rest of the missing property. And that was another reason why the family moved from Calabasas to Beverly Hills, because this was very embarrassing for Jose and Kitty Menendez. And Jose Menendez actually had some thoughts in his head that he might run for political office in the future. His sister told me that he wanted to retire from the entertainment business in five or six years and run for the

US Senate in Florida. So Jose you know, hired a high profile geraldchaliff and the burglary was the burglary case was took place in juvenile court and as part of the resolution of the burglary case, Eric Menandas was ordered to be evaluated by a therapist, and Kitty Menanda's therapist recommended the doctor by the name of Jerome Oziel to do that evaluation with Eric, and so doctor Oziel, who later plays a major role in the Menendez murder case,

that was his initial contact with the Menendez family to prepare this evaluation for juvenile court, and doctor Ozield saw Eric Menendez alone in sessions, but Jose and Kitty Menendez had doctor Oziel has Eric Menanda's sign a release so that doctor Oziel could tell them everything that went on in the therapy session. And there were also some group

sessions with the entire Menendez family. But this burgulary incident, along with the s gang fight that I mentioned both contributed motivated the family motivated Jose Menendez to decide to move the family from Calabasas to Beverly Hills, and so they actually made the move to Beverly Hills around Thanksgiving nineteen eighty eight, about eight months before August twentieth, nineteen eighty nine, the night of the murders.

change in his estate planning. The Jose also had discussions with his sister Martiano the in West Combach, Florida, and he wanted to you know, told her that he was going to be drawing up a new will. But Jose was a very busy entertainment executive and he never got around the following through on those plans to create a new will. And so that this was obviously an important issue and important information during this testimony during the brothers trials.

the day around the house. They lived in an eight thousand square foot mansion on the north Elm Drive, just below Sunset Boulevard in a very upscale section of Beverly Hills, and the Menendez mansion had an Olympic sized swimming pool behind the house, and there was also a tennis court since both brothers were nationally rereg tennis players and practicing frequently, so most of the day the family was around the

house in the pool. The brothers were playing tennis, and at one point the Lyle Menandez had a phone call Perry Berman, a former tennis coach of the brothers and a friend of both brothers, and they talked about meeting up at a food tasting festival in Santa Monica, about twenty minutes west of Beverly Hills, near the beach, and so they made tenative plans to meet at this food festival.

The brothers said they wanted to order Chinese food. Kidding In was cooking fish, she made dinner, and then the brothers left the house and went to see the movie Batman at a nearby movie theater, and that was basically the original narrative of you Know What the Brothers said took place. Perry Berman was at the food festival waiting to meet Eric and Lyle, and they never showed up, and about eleven thirty at night, Lyel Menendez called Perry

Berman and said, where are you? You know, we're here in Santa Monica at the food festival, and Berman said, well, hey, It ended about ten o'clock and he said, you know, I'm just going to bed. Can we talk tomorrow? And Lyle was kind of frantic and he said, no, I need to talk to you right now. He said, I'm really concerned about if I should go back to Princeton and concerned about some issues with his father, and he really pushed and pleaded with Berman to meet the brothers

right away. And initially Lyle asked Berman to come meet the brothers at the Menenda's mansion, and then Berman said, no, I'm not going to do that. He said, I'll meet you at the Cheesecake Factory restaurant. And so Berman went over to the Cheesecake Factory and the restaurant was just closing, the chairs were being put up on the table. And again this is nineteen eighty nine, so we have no cell phones. And so this restaurant was only about ten

minutes away from the Menanda's mansion. So Berman decided to drive over to North elm Drive, and as he pulled up the street, he became very alarmed when he saw that the street was filled with police with flashing lights, and uh, the and and what what what happened was that Eric men in the initial story that Eric and Litlmanendez told the police, they said they had come home and walked in and were shocked to, uh, you know, find the bodies of their parents.

do get there. Tell us a little bit about that, but also what the police failed to do in terms of normal procedure testing in a case like this.

And in the background of that dramatic nine one one call, you can hear Eric Menendez screaming, extremely emotional and at one point Lylmanandez, you know, turns away from the phone and is yelling at Eric, Eric, get away from them. And Beverly Hills is a community which is not used to having too many murder cases. In nineteen eighty nine, Beverly Hills averaged two murders a year, and it's a

small community. The police responded within a few minutes, and as they pulled up, you know, they were very cautious, as they would be in any crime scene. And the brothers were still in the house. And the police called the house and asked the brothers to come outside, and the brothers within thirty seconds came running out the front door. The police went in and began, you know, searching the house, discovered the bodies, and the brothers were extremely emotional, extremely distraught.

Eric Menendez was down on the grass in front of the house, pounding the ground, you know, saying who did this? You know, I'm I'm going to kill them, you know, and just extremely overwhelmed Lyle Menandez was a little cover but clearly upset, and the brothers called. The first person the brothers called was their tennis coach, Mark Effernan, who

lived in Santa Monica. He came over the house and then the officers told the brothers that they were going to take them to the police station to be interviewed by Sergeant Tom Edmunds. And one of the one of the things that happened that night was because of the police felt the brother's emotion with genuine and they were so distraught, the police did not perform gunshot residue tests on American Lyle Menendez. If the police had performed that test kind of a basic procedure Police one oh one.

If the police had performed the GSR test, the Benana's brothers would have been arrested that night, but because the brothers were so distraught, the police didn't do it. The police believed that they were grieving sons. They were both interviewed at the police station and then at one point, at about five thirty in the morning, the brothers returned to the house in a taxi and they had gone out to the home of their tennis coach, Mark Kavnan.

At about five thirty in the morning, the brothers returned to the house and they met Less Sol, the lead investigator for the Beverly Hills Police, and they told Sola that they needed to get inside the house because there was some tennis equipment they wanted to pick up, and they needed to get inside the house, and they also wanted to go inside. Eric car was parked on the street right outside, right in front of the house, and so Zoler told them, you know, they couldn't go in

the house because it was an active crime scene. He asked them to come back in a few hours. The brothers returned about eight thirty in the morning and briefly went inside the house. But the primary reason they returned was they went into Eric's car and filled an athletic bag with shotgun shells and receipts from the purchase of

two shotguns in San Diego several days earlier. And incredibly, in another mistake that the Beverly Hills police made, they never searched that car, even though it was sitting right outside of the house. If the police had searched that car, they would have found shotgun shells and receipts for two shotguns. And once again, that's it's likely that the brothers might have been arrested that night because of that.

so they emptied their weapons. But the police at that time, like you mentioned that they could have had some incredible incriminating evidence, there was a definite lack of evidence otherwise at that crime scene, wasn't there.

Uh the uh, the the parents were literally blown away. As you mentioned, one of the one of the shotguns blasts was a point blank shot to the back of hose aminems Head and the police were, you know, had were really a tough time themselves processing this very bloody crime scene.

been had some connections to the mob. The origins of the home video business were actually in the adult film industry, and so there were many companies that even though they might release you know, mainstream studio movies, they also were releasing the softcore porn or hardcore porn, and so the initial media speculation was about that it was something related to Jose's business and Five days after the murders, the Wall Street Journal ran a headline hints of a mob rubout.

The La Times ran a story in which they had a source in the La Count of shriffs Off that said, these murders stink of organized crime, and so that's what

the family believed there was. The brothers were not suspects publicly, and the speculation about the media was fixated on, you know, that it was some sort of mob hit for several months, but in reality what happened was about ten days after the murders, an attorney representing the mother of a young girl that the brothers went to school within Calabasas called the Beverly Hills Police and suggested that the police should take a look at Eric and Lyle menendez.

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up at the house. So Lyle was clearly trying to, you know, give that impression of the police that that was the direction they should look at Eric menandus was really emotionally distraught and could could really, you know, barely complete sentences in the initial interview the man of the murders, and then there were uh the police were over in New Jersey and uh to interview Jose's sister, Terry Brault and her husband Carlos, and uh just by accident, they

this is about three weeks after the murders. Just by accident, Eric and lotulman and just walked into the house while they're interviewing the Brault and so the police did a second interview with the Menanda's brothers in New Jersey, in which you know, was obviously a calmer setting three weeks after after the deaths of Jose and Kitty, and again the you know, the brothers said they really had no idea, uh, you know what why these murders took place, but they did.

Eric did mention, you know, that he had been involved in this gang fight. And during that second interview in New Jersey, Eric mentioned that he had a therapist named doctor Jero Moziel and that police should talk to him, and the police said, well, sure, we'd like to talk to doctor Rozil, but we would need you to give us a waiver because normally there's a privilege between a therapist and the patient. And Eric Menendez never ends up doing that.

had actually been created. And at one point the the Jose Kitty had a one of the old original Apple computers in their bedroom and so, I'm sorry, it was an IBM computer, and so they wanted to They took a look at the computer the selves and couldn't figure out, you know, how to get into the files, and so they made arrangements for somebody to come and try to look at the computer. Lylemanandas was aware of this, and

before the Barraltz computer expert came over. Lyleman and has opened the Yellow Pages, called a company and had a man called the local la company, and had a man come over. He told that man that he was going to sell the computer and he wanted to erase the hard drive, and the brothers were particularly interested. There were four files titled Eric Lyle, Will and Menendez, and the brothers were extremely interested in those four files. But it turned out there were only about fifty or one hundred

characters in each of those files. So there was no new will on the computer. And even if there had been a will or draft of a will on the computer, I'm not sure that would have been a legal document, since it would have just been a file on a computer and not a signed, notarized document. So Lyle told the computer expert that he called that he hired, that he was selling a computer to please erase everything off

the hard drive. So a couple of days later, another computer expert shows up at the house, the man who had been hired by the family, and he goes to take a look at the computer and the entire hard drive is rased, and so later that obviously became a significant piece of evidence for the prosecution.

and it left everything to the brothers. The family really had no suspicion and no thought that the brothers could have been involved in any way in their parents' murder, and the family in the media, the media kept repeating that the family estate was worth fourteen million dollars. The reality is that the family estate was worth somewhere in the neighborhood of sixty eight million dollars. That's still a

lot of money. But they had a house in Calabasas that they were doing a reconstruction on, and they also

owned a house in Beverly Hills. So really jose and And was kind of heavily leveraged, and so five weeks after the murders, the brothers got together with their aunt, who was back in California from Florida, and she told them that they were the beneficiaries of a life insurance policy, which the brothers did not know anything about until that day, five weeks after the murders, and so five weeks said for the murders, each brother received a check for a

quarter million dollars in cash, and the brothers actually never got their hands on any of the money from the Menandez estate. There was a loan made from the estate to Lyle when he purchased a chicken Wing restaurant in Princeton, but the brothers each get a quarter million dollars in the bank accounts, and they began to go out spending a lot of money. Lyle bought a new Porsche Eric

part cheap. Lyle bought Rolex for himself and a Rolex for Eric, and they were traveling all over the country on Mgmayor, which was a upscale, small airline back then. And the one of the things that people don't always know about the Menanda's family is because the brothers were nation, they were at tennis players josem and Andus had given each brother an American Express card and he allowed them to charge up to ten thousand dollars a month. So this was an upper class family. They were used to

spending a lot of money. The brothers were used to spending a lot of money, So the fact that they continued spending money after their parents' deaths was actually not something that seemed unusual to the family members. And you know, one of the things the media after the brothers were arrested was entirely focused on eric a Lahoman and as went on this crazy spending spree after they killed their parents, and the reality was that they had spent a lot

of money before their parents died. So and one of the things that you know, I like to bring up to people is if you were eighteen years old and somebody handed you a quarter milli million dollars in cash, to me, the surprise would be if he didn't go out and buy a new car, and buy some fancy clothes and buy a watch. So the spending spree evidence was never that critical to me in my evaluation of

the case. And one of the most interesting factoids about the case is that in August of ninety two, one year before the brothers went on trial, prosecutors presented evidence to an La County grand jury, evidence of murder for financial gain, evidence a murder for financial gain. The grand jury did not indict the men and his brothers on

those charges of murder for financial gain. But in spite of the fact that the grand jury did not return that indictment, the prosecution grabbed onto that as their theme because the general public hates the rich, and the prosecution decided and the media had picked up on that theme. One of the interesting elements of the whole Menendez story is how the media back in the early nineteen nineties

the media had such an impact on high profile trials. Again, this is years before the Internet, years many years before social media, and so back then, when the mainstream media set an agenda in your case that was basically it you could stick a fork in it, you were done, you were cooked. And that's what happened with Eric and Lyle Menendez. They became the greedy rich kids from the first week they were arrested, and the media sucked with that.

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Fab fitfun dot com. Now, Robert, we have to talk about how the eventually soon or not so soon, the two are arrested and why, and then take us to the trial, because, as we talked about in the introduction, there's two trials, and there's so much and it's such a complicated case. Let's get to how they were arrested before we start talking about the first trial.

they were spending a lot of money. The Beverly Hills police actually had received this tip about ten days after the murders that they should look take a post look at the brothers, and I was I had just spent two months of reporting about the home video business in my working on a story for the Miami Herald, and so I reached out to all of those contacts that I was in touch with, and the basic consensus was that these killings had nothing to do with the home

video business. And even though the media continued that speculation, I basically hit a wall, hit a dead end, and the reality was that the police were focused on the brothers and I came out to California two months after the murders, five months before the brothers were arrested. In my reporting for that biography about Faza Menendez, and I spent a couple of days with Eric and Lyle, and they were not suspects publicly, I had no reason to be suspicious of them, and we did over the course

of two days. The brothers told me loving stories of how close knit the family was. They told me how much they missed the parents. They were emotionally appropriate, and as I said, I had no reason to be suspicious of them. The two days I spent with the brothers were the end of October nineteen eighty nine, and the second day I was actually with Eric Menendez alone. Lylemanendez

did not want me to use tape recorder. I did audio tape the interview with Eric, and after we finished the interview, Eric actually, you know, invited me to come out and see the family's dream house in Calabasas, so

he volunteered to spend more time with me. Nine days after I did that interview with Eric Menendez, he contacted his therapist, doctor Jeroosiel, and said he needed to come see him, and on that day, Halloween nineteen eighty nine, Eric Menendez confessed to doctor Ozel that he and Lyle were responsible for their parents' deaths. Doctor Oziel was shocked,

you know. He had Eric call Lyle, who was passing out Halloween candy with his girlfriend at the Menanda's mansion, and Lylmanandez rushed over to doctor Rozel's office in Beverly Hills and was extremely upset with Eric was obviously concerned that doctor Rozel was going to go to the Beverly Hills Police and there was a very emotional, dramatic session

with doctor Oziel and the two brothers. At the end of that session, they Doctor Rozille walked the brothers to the elevator and Lyle Menendez shook the therapist's hand and said good luck, good luck, doctor Oziel, as in he was going to need some good luck. Rosil interpreted that moment as that Lyle Menendez was threatening to him. Normally, you have a privilege with a therapist. Then the therapist

cannot reveal what goes out in a therapy session. There's an exception of that privilege under California law called the Terrosoft rule. If you threaten your therapist, or if you threaten you know, if you tell a therapist I'm going to go kill my girlfriend toorrow. Then he is allowed under California law to break the privilege until you know people around him, his family, you know that there's a potential danger, and also to possibly go to the police.

But doctor Rozield did not go to the police. But he had a girlfriend by the name of Judelon Smith. Doctor Roziel was married with two young daughters. He had a girlfriend named Judelon Smith. And there's there's a there's a little confusion over what exactly happened the night that

Eric Menendez confessed to doctor Rozield. Jude Lan Smith originally told police and in some media interviews that she had been in the waiting room of doctor Rozil's office on the night they both was confessed, and that she had overheard the confession as she was sitting down the hall.

I don't believe that ever happened. Doctor Rozil let me into the office and let me see that the waiting room was quite a bit, quite a long distance from the therapy room, and when the door of the therapy room was closed and the door of the waiting room was closed, there's no way that she would have heard anything. I believe what happened is that doctor rosial gossiped with his girlfriend, and then that created a whole new set

of problems. Because doctor Roziale was interested in kind of maintaining control over the Menanda's brothers, he talked to them about possibly becoming their financial advisor, and at one point they so they started having therapy sessions after the night confession, and doctor Roziel at one point a few weeks in said, look, I'm going to schedule two therapy sessions a day, one for each of you, five days a week. And he said told them, I don't care if you ever show up.

And the brothers, you know, really obviously interpreted that and he was blackmailing them, and that was an accusation that the events made during the first trial. The family members kept getting these large bills from doctor Roziel. Their aunt Marxiano received one bill for ten thousand dollars and called Eric and said what's going on, And Eric said, oh, Aunt March, this is really important to therapy, so please

just keep paying these bills. And in the background of all of this, the relationship between doctor Roziel and Judelan Smith was beginning to go sour and he had, as I mentioned, he had already revealed that the brothers had confessed to him. And so Smith started making threats, saying that she was going to go to the Battle of Hill's police and tell them the brothers had confessed. And at one point doctor Roziel recorded an hour long therapy session.

He put quotes around that, and they had these tapes in a safe deposit box and as a way to ensure his safety, so Judlan Smith was aware that there was a tape of the brothers and also audio notes from some of these therapy sessions. And so, in a curious twist of the the o'zell Smith story, doctor Oziel and his wife moved Smith into their house with their daughters in an effort to keep the lid on her,

to keep her from going to the police. And at some point several months later that whole situation blows up. Doctor Oziel and his wife, who was also a therapist, come home one night. All the furniture in their house is been rearranged, and doctor Zeal walks down the hallway and here's Smith talking to his eight year old daughter and telling her, I'm going to be your new mommy. And your mommy is going to be leaving y Ozell's

kick Smith out of the house. And the next day she goes to the Beverly Hills Police and a day later Lyle Menenda. A day later, the Beverly Hell's Police show up at doctor Oziel's house for the search bar. They seize the audio tapes for his safe deposit box, and a few hours later, Lyle Menendez is arrested.

he was simply trying to save his career. But the issue of the admission of those tapes went all the way to the California Supreme Court, and shortly before the trial, the California Supreme Court ruled that the tapes could be

admitted as evidence. The interesting thing about the trial of the case was that the Beverly Hills police did not really have a strong case without those tapes, But once the tapes were admitted as evidence, the defense had to completely shift and the case went from being a if those tapes had not been admitted, even though we would have been like the Emperor's new clothes. Everybody knew there were tapes and what was on those tapes. But if the tapes had not been admitted as evidence in the court,

the defense would have been who done it? You know, you say, Eric LAHMANA has killed their parents, Let's see your evidence. And the prosecution did not have a strong case.

But the tapes were admitted, and so the defense shifted and About two weeks before the trial, Leslie Abramson, the lead defense attorney with the blonde, curly hair, did an interview with the La Times in which she revealed that the defense was the brothers were going to tell a story of a lifetime of abuse and molization and a series of confrontations in the days before the murders that led up to the actual killing of Jose and Kitty Menendez,

and the general public was a little confused. Most of the public believed because of the media coverage that Eric and Lyle Menendez's defense was we were abused, we were molested, and so therefore we get a pass, or that's why we killed our parents. The actual legal defense was we were in fear for our lives. There were these series, and.

that's unreasonable in someone else's mind. Robert has just left us in mid question, and I was just talking to him about the distinction in the in the first trial in terms of the admissibility of two of the tapes of or four tapes, and two of those tapes were deemed admissible because they did speak to the threats that were the alleged threats that were made by the psychiatrist by o'zill. The distinction in court was that they would be able to a jury would be able to hear

that information. And here we are with Robert again to explain.

killing of their parents. And Gerald Chliff, who was one of the criminal defense attorneys involved in the case early on, and he was Lyle's original defense attorney when he was arrested, Gerald Chaalliff actually had a meeting with doctor Rozel in his office for about an hour before they brought the brothers in and then Chliff left the room and Ozell recorded this hour long so called therapy session with the brothers. And in this sixty minute tape, which was obviously a

key piece of evidence in the in the trials. Uh, the brothers are heard saying that they, you know, we're thinking about whether actually commit the murders for several days and you know, talked and it's just kind of a strange tape. Doctor Ozel is doing most of the talking. He's really kind of leading the brothers. There are some harsh moments. There was one moment where Lyle says, you know, I missed my mother, but I also miss my dog.

If I could make such a gross analogy. Uh, the tape was really pretty damaging for the for the brothers defense. But in an interesting twist, there's so many interesting twists in this story. In an interesting twist, after the Supreme Court,

you know, ruled that the tape could be admitted as evidence. Obviously, the prosecution was going to admit or present introduce the case the tape during their case, and the defense waited until both of the brothers testified and then the defense actually introduced the tape, and the reason they did that was because they knew it was going to be introduced

one way or the other. So by the defense introducing it, then after the tape was played, they immediately put three or four therapy experts defense therapy experts on the stand to put their spin on this whole tape, and so that really kind of softened the blow of some of the negative things, you know, that were the jury was hearing in that one hour tape.

their husband or boyfriend. And so the menimous defense was kind of unique in that basically they were creating a new you know, kind of a tangent of that defense, and that was they were creating a battered child defense. It was important and important element for the defense attorneys to present the entire family history of jose and Kate Menendez, including their own childhoods. And the judge Stanley Weisberg, who had also been the judge on the famous Rodney King

trial that led to the La Riots. Judge Weisberg gave the defense quite a bit of leeway in the first trial and allowed them to present up sixty five teachers, coaches, family friends, relatives, and so the jury heard quite a bit of evidence about the background of Eric and Lyle Menendez.

And it's difficult for the public because the public, you know, when you're only here, you know, seeing a daily newspaper story or you're seeing a minute thirty TV story in the eleven o'clock news, it's really difficult to get into these complex issues. But the fact that half of the menendous jurors voted for manslaughter in the first trial, and half of the juris voted for murder tells you that evidence of the family history had a significant impact in

the decision making of the jury. There were two juries, one for each other in the first trial.

a father would never do that to his sons. And I think twenty six years later, you know, I think society has evolved in that people are willing to accept the possibility that these this type of abuse does take place.

each jury room, and a mistrial was declared. And within an hour after that mistrial was declared, LA District Attorney Gil Garcetti had a news conference and announced immediately that he was going to retry the menandas brothers because he he said, this is a case of first degree murder and you know, we're not going to settle this case. We're going back to trial again. And if this had not been a high profile media case, there would never

have been a second trial. There would have been a plea agreement and that would have been in but the Li County there are politics in the loved in this story. Also, the l County District Attorney's office was on a terrible

losing streak. They had lost a case called the McMartin molestation trial, they had lost the Rodney King trial, and they lost the OJ trial, so they really needed to win, and the second Menendez trial, unfortunately for the brothers, had The brothers had the misfortune of their second trial started the day after the OJ Simpson verdict in October nineteen ninety five. So the first thing the judge did was he kicked out the TV camera because he knew that

would cut down on the media coverage. And then the judge perceived to basically reverse most of his evidence rulings from the first trial, and the defense had the heart of its case from the first trial cut out the defense. The judge was determined not to allow most of the witnesses the defense had put on in its first trial and the therapy experts and the witnesses that did testify,

the judge severely limited their testimony. So in the second trial there was only one jury and the jurors heard a completely different set of evidence than the first trial jurors. The second trial was really much more like a traditional murder trial with forensic people, blood spatter experts. The prosecution brought in a company to do a reconstruction of the

crime scene that went on for days and days. And this company that was called Failure Analysis, they had never done in reconstruction of a crime scene before, they had no background did that. There was the head of the company, Roger McCarthy, was a key prosecution witness in the second trial. Failure Analysis was known for recreating the Space Challenger shuttle disaster and doing a recreation of what happened that exon

Veldi's oil spill. But they'd never been involved in a mirror case before, and so the second trial was very different. It wasn't on TV, much less media coverage, and the defense basically was limited in every direction that they tried

to go. They weren't allowed to put on the heart of their case that had been the defense in the first trial, and then as the case was coming to a close, Judge Stanley Weisford put the final nail in the brothers coffin when he ruled that the jury could not consider manslaughter charges for them and he was not going to allow the defense to turn needs to argue for an imperfect self defense manslaughter verdict. And basically, as the second trial was ending, the jury was restricted to

either secondary murder or first greed murder conviction. In March nineteen ninety six, the single jury returned a first screen murder connection. The first the jury returned to a first screen murder conviction for Eric and Lyle Menendez, and then that meant that there would be a penalty phase to determine. The jury had two choices based on the judges instructions, and those choices were the death penalty or life without parole. And then a penalty phase was held for several weeks.

the jurors voted for life without parole. And after the second trial, after the penalty phase verdict, some of the jurors were involved in a news conforts in the courtroom and several jurors said that they thought that death They thought life without parole was a harsher sentence on the

death penalty. And several months after that I interviewed many of the jurors and several of them told me that if they had heard that family history in the guilty of the case, they would not have voted for murder. And so there have been accusations made that there was some sort of fix going on with the judge and the way everything rolled out and the brothers went through

all their appeals. Their final appeal was at the Ninth Circuit Court in California, and one of the justices, Alex Kazinsky, said during that appeal hearing that he believed there had been collusion between Judge Weisberg and the DA's office, and yet Justice Kazinski still voted down the appeal.

and the molestation that took place in the family. And I believe them not just based on their testimony, which is very compelling and the hundreds of hours of you know, interviews and phone calls we've had over the years, but I have had so much contact with the brothers to it's Marta and Joan, and I have learned so much about what was going on inside this family that this

is not a story about two greedy, rich kids. The real story of the Menendez murders is a case of involving a family where there was intergenerational sexual abuse, and Jose Menendez was molested by his mother according to his sister Martinicano, and Kitty Menandez was molested by an older member of the family according to her sister Joan Vandermullen. And so one of the key witnesses for the defense

was Martakano's son, Andy Cano. And Andy testified in both trials and he told the story of when he was ten years old and Eric was twelve, and one day they were out playing in the field. Eric Menendez asked Andy if his father, you know, ever touched his generals or massages genitals, and you know, Andy was ten years old.

He was kind of surprised and he said no, and Eric talked about that something was going on with his father, but he made Eric swear with a pinky promise that he would never tell anybody, and immediately wanted to go tell his brother. Eric said no, my father will come me if you tell anybody. And so that was key testimony in both trials. And then as I was working

on my book. I was close to the deadline of my book in March of twenty eighteen, and marcha Caiano had invited me over to her home in West Palm Beach and we were going through. She thought that there might have been some letters between Eric and Andy Cano, and so we were going through. Andy tragically died in two thousand and three. He was very traumatized by this case and he took an accidental overdose of sleeping pills.

And so Martakano had boxes of Andy's possessions and papers in her attict, and we pulled some of those boxes down and started going through the boxes, and within an hour I found a letter that Eric Menendez had written to Andy Cano in December of nineteen eighty eight, and in that letter, Eric Menendez talks about it's clear from the letter that Eric Menendez was having ongoing communication with

his cousin Andy about the molestation. And I'll read you one quick paragraph a couple sentences her letter, in which Eric wrote to his cousin, I've been trying to avoid Dad. It's still happening Andy, but it's worse for me. Now I can't explain it. He's so overweight that I can't stand to see him. I never know when it's going to happen, and it's driving me crazy. Every night I say, I'm thinking he might come in. I need to put

it out of my mind. I know what you said before, but I'm afraid you just don't know Dad like I do. He's crazy. He's warned me a hundred times about telling anyone.

So this was quite When I read this letter out loud in Marchikano, she became emotional and we were both extremely surprised because I knew all the evidence from both trials and over the course of the investigation, and I contacted the lawyers and the brothers, and you know, found out that this letter had never been introduced at either of the trials or was never brought up in any

evidence hearing. And there is no the letter was just a loose couple of pages, you know, in about with many other papers, there's no post there's no envelope with a postmark. But the letter is self authenticated by references that Eric is making in it. One of them is he's talking about a Christmas family that the Christmas party that the family had just held at the mansion with all the employees at Live Entertainment, and I knew about

that party. I knew when it took place. And he also talked about in the letter that the family had just hired Mark Teffernan as their new tennis coach, and that took place in November of nineteen eighty eight. And the brothers at Peel Attorney is having forensic testing done and it can be determined by it's a handwritten letter. It can be determined approximately the date that letter was written, and the appeal attorney is confident that it really was

written in December of nineteen eighty eight. The murders were August of eighty nine. So in order the brothers have exhausted all the original appeals, in order to open a new appeal in California, you have to have new evidence, and so that letter is one piece of potential new evidence that could lead to the filing of a new appeal. I hope there will be the filing of a new appeal. And there is some other evidence that I have discovered

since my book was published. And so basically I just want to say stay tuned because this story isn't over yet.

that would they would lose their competitive competitiveness. The humiliation and degradation regardless of the success that they had in Tennis, the monitoring, and right at the end where Eric was supposed to go to usel Ucla to go to school, he was also told by his father, now you're going to stay home three or four days so we can

monitor your work. And these are grown adults that they were doing this, And what lent credibility to what you were saying is that their defense was their claim was by Abramsom was that they were afraid that night, they

were afraid that they were going to be killed. There was a conversation that was said by their father that indicated to them they said that no matter that their choices had been made, and they believe their father was a very dangerous person that would put into motion this threat. Wasn't that true.

they could date, who they could be friends with. So they controlled every aspect of their son's lives. So this was a family in which the Hosean Kitty were very careful to maintain the facade of the perfect family. You know, on the outside, this family looked perfect. They lived in a mansion in Beverly Hill's father was an entertainment executive, making millions dollars a year, the mother former beauty queen, you know, happy housewife, and the sons weren't nationally ranked

tennis players. So on the outside, this family looked perfect, but it was all of a sudden the reality was that the Menenda's family was spinning out of control. A pair of dysfunctional parents had raised a couple of dysfunctional kids, and everything ended in this terrible tragedy.

series as a consultant. And the series stars e Falco and it is streaming on all major platforms and if you're interested in the case, it's a very good binge series to Binge, so please check that out as well as my website Menendez Murders dot com.