Kitty Menendez was another matter. But Lyle did return, and worked briefly for Live Entertainment, where he showed all the worst qualities of the spoiled rich boy holding down a grace-and-favor job in his fathers company. The sons of the house, Lyle and Erik, having returned from the movies, where they said they saw Batman again after they couldnt get into Licence to Kill because of the lines, drove in the gate at 722 North Elm Drive, parked their car in the courtyard, entered the house by the front door, and found their parents dead, sprawled on the floor and couch in the television room. 1 singles player on the team. On Aug. 20, 1989, Mary "Kitty" Menendez and her husband Jose Menendez were infamously killed in the living room of their Beverly Hills home while watching a movie. Since their arrest in March, Lyle and Erik Menendez have dwelt in the Los Angeles County Mens Central Jail, in the section reserved for prisoners awaiting trial in heavily publicized cases. When Jose forbade Lyle to go to Europe with an older girlfriend, Lyle went anyway. During the trial, the Menndez brothers. The judge then ruled that young Miller, who had been diagnosed as schizophrenic, was legally innocent of murder by reason of insanity. They appeared in V-necked, short-sleeved jailhouse blues with T-shirts underneath. He is very sweet, very sexy, has a great body, and is an all-round great guy. Noelle, together with Jamie Pisarcik, Lyles girlfriend, visits the brothers in jail every day, and has been present at every court appearance of the brothers since their arrest. Was that in order? he asked. The home is located on the east side of the street and is a large, white . Before I could reply with such words as patricide, matricide, wealth, Beverly Hills, she had thought over what she had said. In a typical reaction, Jose became more angry at the school than he was at his son. In the embarrassing aftermath of the burglaries, the family moved to the house on Elm Drive in Beverly Hills. Erik, left, and Lyle, right, are pictured in this . THE (former) MENENDEZ HOUSE in Beverly Hills, California (where Lyle & Erik Menendez shot and killed their parents in 1989) (This is a private home, so don't trespass and don't disturb the occupants.) He was always ahead of his competition. When Jose was brought to International Video Entertainment (IVE) by Rambo movies producer Carolco, which now owns 49 percent of the company, he immediately pared the staff from 550 to 167 and closed the companys expensive Woodland Hills, Calif., office. They order reading material from Book Soup, the trendy Sunset Strip bookshop. Oziel came out and asked Lyle to come in. She told me he made threats to Oziel that they were going to kill him. Once, Jose took the Concorde to Europe just to watch Lyle play in a tennis tournament, and then came right back. Brian Andersen, Kittys brother, spoke lovingly about Kitty, and each son spoke reverently about his parents. As the months passed, it was whispered that Erik had confessed to the murders to Craig. There are more people by far who will tell you that he was greatly disliked. He nodded to Noelle Terelsky. However, for all the seeming closeness of the family, the sons were proving to be disappointments, even failures, in the eyes of their perfection-demanding father. Then there was the ghoulish sense of humor another of their friends spoke about: sitting with a gang of pals one night, deciding what videos to rent for the evening, Erik suggested Dad and Parenthood. The suspension lasted a year. They looked like wax. Until recently, when the house on Elm Drive was rented to the member of the Saudi royal family, the two girls lived in the guesthouse, as the guests of Maria Menendez, the proud and passionate grandmother of Lyle and Erik, who believes completely in the innocence of her grandsons. Arriving home shortly before midnight, they said they found the driveway gate unlocked and the front door open. Judalon Smyth also told the Beverly Hills police that, at the request of Dr. Oziel, she had stood outside the door of his inner office and, unbeknownst to the Menendez brothers, listened to their confession and threats. One of those who lived had part of her brain removed. They were older. Why did you give the finger to the cameraman? I asked her. She told me, Those kids watched their mother become a doormat for their father. They almost certainly wore rubber gloves. Only the defense attorneys, who did not want the tapes to be heard, had been allowed to participate in the hearings. They had dishes of strawberries and ice cream on the table in front of the sofa where they were sitting. They used to say about Kitty that she was Jose with a wig. By signing up you agree to our User Agreement and Privacy Policy & Cookie Statement. Erik decided not to attend U.C.L.A., which had been his fathers plan for him, but to pursue a career in tennis instead. He was the only one who knew they were abused children, who knew how horrible their home life was, who knew that Jose was a monster father, who knew that Kitty was an abused wife. In a further surprise, Deputy District Attorney Elliott Alhadeff, who won the original court ruling that the tapes would be admissible, was abruptly replaced on the notorious case by Deputy District Attorney Pamela Ferrero. Surprisingly, a buyer did come along. In total, more than $100,000 in money and jewels was taken from the two housesnot an insignificant sum. She pushed Oziels button to let him know she was there. Lyle decided to go into the restaurant business, and paid a reported $550,000 for a cafeteria-style eatery in Princeton which he renamed Mr. Buffalos, flying back and forth coast to coast on MGM Grand Air. In shock at the grisly sight, Lyle telephoned for help. So were the Armani-type suits. The lavatory beneath the stairs and adjacent to the television room does not have a shower. Lyle and Jerry followed. From a window in the office, Smyth could see Lyle and Oziel talking to Erik, who was in his Jeep on Bedford Drive. According to Smyth, Oziel wanted Erik to tell Lyle that he had confessed to him. They telephoned one another several times a day, about tennis matches and girlfriends and the results of exams. Lyle is wonderful. A girl I was going out with lusted after him, a student told me. with this post, location or person. He was unpopular with the career-oriented staff. Later, in a highly unusual move, investigators obtained cassette tapes of therapy sessions conducted with Erik and Lyle by a Beverly Hills psychologist, L. Jerome Oziel. At a point Craig decided to tell them what he knew. When I asked this same spokesperson about the possibility of a second screenplay written by Craig and Erik, he said he had never seen one. Please log in if you don't want to post She is considered one of the most merciless cross-examiners in the legal business, with a remarkable ability to degrade and confuse prosecution witnesses. At 23, he was hired away by one of his clients, a Chicago-based shipping company, as its comptroller. The Briar Patch tapes, which she described to me as quick-fix sort of stuff, not deep therapy, told her she could break the pattern of picking the wrong kind of men in five minutes. Furthermore, please leave your thoughts and comments below. It was further said that Craig told the police about the confession, but there were not the hard facts on which to make an arrest, such as came later from Judalon Smyth. She was always very much at his side, part of his vision, dedicated to the cause, whatever the cause was.. Abramson met her present husband, Tim Rutten, an editorial writer for the Los Angeles Times, at a dinner party at Chaleffs home. Lyle bought a $60,000 Porsche 911 Carrera to replace the Alfa Ramero his father had given him. What was taped was Oziels documentation of everything that happened in that session and subsequent sessions with the boys, giving times and dates, telling about the confession and the threat on his life, a log of what was happening during the time his life was in danger. Smyth further contends that, as time went on, the relationship between the doctor and the boys grew more stable, and the doctor no longer felt threatened. In addition, the house in Calabasas has been on the market for some time and remains unsold; $1.5 million is still owed on it. Jose lived through Lyle. You have been charged with multiple murder for financial gain, while lying in wait, with a loaded firearm, for which, if convicted, you could receive the death penalty. An ongoing story is that a relation of the Menendez brothers threatened Craig after hearing he had gone to the police. Prosecutors were then given a date by which to file opposing arguments. A further setback for the family, also partly covered up, had occurred the previous winter, when Lyle was suspended from Princeton after one semester for cheating in Psychology 101. But the two handsome sons were never totally beyond suspicion; they were the sole beneficiaries of their parents estimated $14 million estate, and there was the matter of that curious screenplay. The brothers got involved in two very serious criminal offenses, a burglary at the home of Michael Warren Ginsberg in Calabasas and grand theft at the home of John Richard List in Hidden Hills. Gerald Chaleff is Lyles. A look back at the unthinkable. Lamm described Kitty to me as being deeply unhappy over her husbands philandering. 2023 Cond Nast. The killers would probably have unlocked the doors in advance. Menendez and Cignarelli went out to the street to face their adversaries, and a fight started. Over the previous two years, the handsome, athletic, and gifted Menendez sons had been getting into trouble. Kitty, 44, had been shot five times. Nor did Oziel, who she believes, discussed everything about the case with her, ever discuss sexual abuse. Residents of Beverly Hills, California, were left shocked when corporate executive Jose Menendez and his wife, Mary Louise "Kitty" Menendez, were murdered inside their home in cold blood. But everything changed on August 20, 1989, with the gruesome shotgun slayings of their parents, Jos and Kitty. Everything was solved to perfection. On the day after the boys confessed, Smyth says, Oziel warned her in a threatening manner not to tell anyone what she had heard. Could it be possible that these boys were puppets of their fathers dark side? Either they didnt return her calls or they were away. She had June Allyson looks. The Menendez brothers' home. On the night of the murders, the boys had hidden the two shotguns in the trunk of one of their parents cars in the garage. . The Menendez family home is located in an area of Beverly Hills known as "The Flats", about 1 block south of Santa Monica Blvd on N. Elm Dr. Podolsky in Princeton. Did you ever know the Menendez brothers? I asked the teenager. A week before, two rich and privileged young men named Lyle and Erik Menendez had been arrested for the brutal slaying of their parents in the family's $5 million mansion on Elm Drive, a sedate. Another officer declared, two days after the event, These kids fried their parents. Most newspaper accounts say that Karen Lamm and Kitty Menendez met in an aerobics class, but Lamm, who said she dislikes exercise classes, gave a different account of the beginning of their friendship. Did you talk to her? At the time, the boys were hiding out in hotels, saying they thought the Mafia was after them. He also persuaded him to call Lyle and ask him to come to the office immediately. He also said that the district attorney, Elliott Alhadeff, was satisfied that all the information on the confession tapes was known to Craig, so in the events that the tapes were ruled inadmissible by the court he would be able to supply the information on the stand. According to Smyth, Erik knew, from his period of therapy with Oziel after the burglaries, where the doctor lived in Sherman Oaks, a suburb of Los Angeles in the San Fernando Valley. Subsequently, a rich woman in Los Angeles told me that her bodyguard, a former cop, had heard from a friend of his on the Beverly Hills police force that Kitty Menendez had been shot in the vagina. The kids had a sense of being young royalty, said an employee of the company. They liked high-tech surroundings, and they wanted to get out of the house, one of their friends said to me. In any case, your attention, once you are in the house, is not on the furniture. Last fall he took an apartment nearby and showed up, students report, driving a gray Porsche Carrera. Again taking over, he tried to talk the authorities at Princeton into reinstating his son, but this time the pressure he applied did not work. The prosecution, which did want them to be heard, was barred. The hit, if hit it was, looked more like a Columbian drug-lord hit, like the bloody massacre carried out by Al Pacino in the film Scarface, which, incidentally, was one of Lyles favorite movies. An arriving patient pushes a button with the name of the doctor he is there to see, and a light goes on in the inner office to let the doctor know that his next patient has arrived. When Oziel hung up the telephone, he said to Smyth that he hoped it wasnt what he feared it was going to be. We had to hire an attorney to field calls. The spokesperson said that from the beginning it was presumed that Craig knew something.. Young Jose, who excelled in swimming, basketball, and soccer, won a swimming scholarship to Southern Illinois University, but he gave it up when he married Mary Louise Andersen, known as Kitty, at the age of nineteen and moved to New York. The arrangement for Live Entertainment to purchase the property from the estate failed to go into effect, once the police investigation pointed more and more toward the boys, and so the estate has had to assume the immense cost of maintaining the properties. During the meal, we talked. Though Princeton officials will say only that he withdrew, the student newspaper reported that Lyle was suspended for copying another students psychology lab report. A more intimate picture of Kitty comes from Karen Lamm, one of the most highly publicized secondary characters in the Menendez saga. Right away, he called the boys and offered his help. He went to the house on Elm Drive and to the memorial service at the Directors Guild, even though his relationship with the family had been minimal. It was. She wanted to go on his business trips with him. Seena Hamilton, a family friend who founded Miamis famous Easter Bowl tennis tournament, didnt take Erik seriously as a player and has said she believes he turned to the game as an emotional escape. Yet recently Erik traveled to Israel for a series of matches. Because of the brutal nature of the murders, and evidence of careful planning beforehand, authorities may ask for the death penalty if the brothers are convicted. It is rumored that Abramson and Chaleff are each being paid $700,000. According to Los Angeles Deputy District Attorney Elliott Alhadeff, the brothers had threatened Oziel. A beautiful former actress and model who was once wed to the late Dennis Wilson of the Beach Boys, Lamm is now a television producer, and she and her partner, Zev Braun, are developing a mini-series based on the Menendez case. Erik was playing in a tennis tournament in Israel, where he had been for two weeks, accompanied by Mark Heffernan, his $50,000-a-year tennis coach. Vanity Fair may earn a portion of sales from products that are purchased through our site as part of our Affiliate Partnerships with retailers. He urged Lyle to stay on in Princeton rather than return to Beverly Hills, so that he would not have to admit to anyone that Lyle had been kicked out. anonymously (anonymous users cannot post links). The couple's young sons,. On top of that, there were life-insurance policies. What has emerged most significantly in the year since the murders is that all was not what it seemed in the seemingly perfect Menendez household. The incident sparked a close friendship between the two, which would culminate in the co-writing of a movie script called Friends, in which a young man named Hamilton Cromwell murders his extremely rich parents for his inheritance. On the day before the catastrophic event, a Saturday, they chartered a boat called Motion Picture Marine in Marina del Rey and spent the day together shark fishing, just the four of them. Nearly seven years, three trials, and many thousands of hours of TV coverage later,. Before saving Cuba, though, Erik decided to try his luck as a professional tennis player. But the subject continues to surface. In the October 1990 issue, Dominick Dunne talks to the mystery witness who says she heard everything, and uncovers the secrets that turned the Menendezes American dream into a fatal nightmare. Brothers Lyle and Erik Menendez were convicted of the 1989 murders of their parents Jose and Kitty Menendez at their Beverly Hills mansion. In a lawsuit filed in the Superior Court of the State of California by Judalon Rose Smyth against L. Jerome Oziel, Ph.D., on May 31, three months after the arrest of the Menendez brothers, it is charged that while Smyth was receiving psychiatric and psychological counseling from defendant Oziel he improperly maintained Smyth on large dosages of drugs and, during said time periods, manipulated and took advantage of Smyth, controlled Smyth, and limited Smyths ability to care for herself creating a belief in Smyth that she could not handle her affairs without the guidance of Oziel, and convincing Smyth that no other therapist could provide the insight and benefit to her life that Oziel could. In the second cause of action in the suit, Smyth charges that on February 16, 1990, defendant Oziel placed his hands around her throat attempting to choke her, and pulled her hair with great force. There is more than money involved here. The family lived at first in Calabasas, an upper-middle-class suburb of Los Angeles, inland beyond Malibu, where they occupied one house while building a more spectacular one on thirteen acres with mountaintop views. And then there were the Woodman brothers, Stewart and Neil, accused of hiring two assassins to gun down their rich parents in Brentwood. On the evening of the following day, August 20, 1989, the seemingly idyllic world that Jose Menendez had created was shattered. He also pushed the button to indicate to Oziel that he had arrived. The home is located on the east side of the street and is a large, white, spanish style home with a red tile roof. On July 22, 1983, in a Sunset Boulevard mansion in Bel-Air, twenty-year-old Ricky Kyle shot his father, millionaire Henry Harrison Kyle, the president of Four Star International, a television-and-movie-production firm, in the back after awakening him in the middle of the night to tell him there was a prowler in the house. He chose to leave. Several times the boys turned around and flashed smiles at their pretty girlfriends. He probably wouldve done it, and he probably wouldve been assassinated somewhere down the line. According to Erik, he and Lyle planned to move to Florida, where they would establish a political base. An ironic bit of drama came at precisely that moment, when a vice president of the company burst in on the meeting with the news that Lyle Menendez had just been arrested. Did she tell you the company had Jose taken care of for the $15 million insurance policy? The grandmother had not told me this, but it is a theory that the dwindling group of people who believe in the innocence of the Menendez boys cling to with passion. He radiated confidence and showed no emotion, unless it was a convenient moment. Erik, on the other hand, fell apart. All the while, Jose was making important connections in the entertainment world. As self-protection, she told them that the Menendez boys had killed their parents. He was shorter than me, blond, balding, with a round face. She told me she was attracted to men who looked like the actor Ken Wahl, or Tom Cruise. He was advising them about attorneys for the will, etc. Judalon Smyth had also been on the stand for two days in private sessions, being grilled by Leslie Abramson. Abramson called Oziel a gossip, a liar, and less than credible. Neither Judalon Smyths name or her role in the proceedings was ever mentioned. This was borne out to me by Judalon Smyth. Brothers Lyle and Erik Menendez were convicted of the 1989 murders of their parents Jose and Kitty Menendez at their Beverly Hills mansion. They talked about world events, as well as about what was happening in Joses business. Another neighbor said on television that she had seen one of the Menendez boys curled up in a ball on the lawn in front of their house and screaming in grief. All rights reserved. In the will, it was stated that if Kitty died first everything would go to Jose, and if Jose died first everything would go to Kitty. You want that? she said with an angry sneer into the camera, thrusting the finger at the lens, a shot that appeared on the NBC special Expos, narrated by Tom Brokaw. Her murderers then reloaded and fired into her face, causing multiple lacerations of the brain. Her face was an unrecognizable pulp. At a Malibu barbecue, a film star said to me, I heard the mother was shot up the wazoo. There is, however, no indication of such a penetration in the autopsy report, which carefully delineates each of the ten wounds from the nine shots fired into Kitty Menendezs body. The particulars of the murders she is not allowed to discuss, because of an agreement with the Beverly Hills police, but occasionally, in our conversation, things would creep in. He interjected himself into their lives, said Smyth. When there is a murder rap, Leslie is the best in town.. Expressing fear that the Mob might be after them as well, the brothers moved from hotel to hotel in the aftermath of the murders.
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