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'Law & Order True Crime: The Menendez Brothers' Is 'All Seven Deadly Sins in One Place'. In The Menendez Murders, the trial’s court records are gospel. “It’s all taken straight from the. The Background of the Menendez Brothers Trial On August 20th, 1989, the Menendez Brothers – Lyle and Erik – undertook the murder of their parents on the grounds of their Beverley Hills home in the State of California.
(Court TV) -- Developments in the retrial of Lyle and Erik Menendez from October 11-October 13, 1995:
OCTOBER 11
Erik and Lyle Menendez were motivated by greed when they ambushed their parents in the family's Beverly Hills home more than six years ago, a prosecutor charged during the first day of the brothers' retrial.
'The defendants stood to inherit their family's fortune,' Deputy District Attorney David Conn told jurors during his opening statement. 'They were trying to get their hands on their parents' money.'
But defense attorney Leslie Abramson dismissed the greed motive during her opening statement.
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Abramson, who represents Erik Menendez, said the brothers killed out of 'mind-numbing, adrenaline-pumping fear' that their parents would kill them first for threatening to expose a highly dysfunctional family's secrets. When Erik told Lyle days before the slaying that their father had been molesting him for 12 years, 'he told the most shameful of family secrets--the incest secret,' Abramson said.
Lyle Menendez's lead attorney, Charles A. Gessler, did not get a chance to address the jury. He's expected to give his opening statement Thursday.
Prosecutors are seeking first-degree murder convictions and the death penalty for the August 20, 1989 slayings of Jose and Kitty Menendez.
Conn opened the state's case by showing jurors gruesome autopsy and crime scene photos. The brothers, he said, 'burst into the room with shotguns and began shooting their parents to death...Hundreds of shotgun pellets tore into the bodies of Kitty and Jose Menendez. We will show that they were ambushed in a storm of gunfire...Kitty and Jose Menendez had no means whatsoever to defend themselves against this barrage.There was no place to hide. There was no time to run.'
Conn told the jurors that shortly before the killings, the brothers who lived on an allowance and credit cards started to despair that they would never get their hands on their parents' money. Jose Menendez was unhappy with his sons and threatened to write them out of his will, Conn said.
Within 24 hours of the murder, Conn continued, the brothers 'were carrying their dead parents' safe to the home of a probate attorney. The defendants stood to inherit their family's fortune. They were trying to get their hands on their parents' money.'
The brothers' first trial ended in deadlock last year with separate juries split between murder and manslaughter charges.
Abramson reminded jurors that they will be asked to decide between murder and manslaughter. 'Manslaughter is all we're asking of you,' she said.
The defense contends the brothers had an irrational fear that their lives were in danger, and are asking for manslaughter convictions under a legal concept known as the 'imperfect self-defense.'
'We will prove to you Erik was tortured, terrorized, exploited, molested and abused to such a state he lived in a constant state of fear of his parents and believed both of them would and could have killed him,' Abramson told the jurors.
Abramson said the lights were out when the brothers walked into the family room, carrying shotguns, after an argument with their parents. Erik saw a shadowy figure in the blue haze of the television set, she said, and the image flashed him back to his father's shadow haunting his door each time he had been molested as a child. He fired randomly, in a blind panic, she said.
OCTOBER 12
Lyle and Erik Menendez killed their parents not out of greed but because they feared their parents' 'supernatural powers,' an attorney for Lyle Menendez told jurors.
Completing opening statements, Charles Gessler said the brothers began to believe their parents had such powers and were planning to kill their children.
The brothers have admitted killing their parents but said they were driven to it after years of physical and sexual abuse. They are being retried because their first trial before two separate juries ended with both panels deadlocked.
Gessler said the brothers became terrified the week before the killings because their parents seemed to 'know everything' about their sons' activities. 'Mr and Mrs Menendez were pretending to have supernatural powers,' he said. 'Really, they learned through bugging the phones and other means.'
He noted that Jose and Kitty Menendez were hit by 11 shotgun blasts, indicating 'overkill that speaks of the fear that was involved here.'
The prosecution theory that the brothers wanted their parents' money was wrong because Erik and Lyle thought at the time that they had been disowned, Gessler told the court.
OCTOBER 13
The jury heard tapes of the brothers admitting to their therapist that they killed their wealthy parents.
'There was no way I was going to kill my parents without Erik's consent,' Lyle, 27, told his former therapist Jerome Oziel. 'I wanted (Erik) to sleep on it a couple of days.'
Erik, 24, later told Oziel: 'I couldn't live with (my parents) anymore...I didn't have a choice to do what I did... I hate myself for it.'
Menendez Brothers Murder Case
The defense objected to the playing of the Oziel tapes, saying the brothers had been manipulated into confessing.
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In earlier testimony, prosecutor David Conn played a taped of a Beverly Hills police detective's interview with the brothers about a month after the August 1989 slayings. The brothers said they were not having problems with their parents, and attempted to establish an alibi.E-mail to a friend