A century after Lizzie Borden’s
hatchet “over-kill” in Fall River, and 3000 miles away, another famous American
murder case with compelling similarities took place. On August 30th
1989, 21-year-old Lyle Menendez and his brother Eric 18 entered their family’s
23-room mansion in Beverly Hills after carefully disarming the alarm. Having
given the maid the night off, José and Kitty Menendez had fallen asleep
watching television. José was guilty of one thing that we know of: having
raised his sons in a wealthy childhood and then expecting them to work and
achieve. Carrying two newly-purchased shotguns loaded with buck shot, the boys
first fired a shot into their father’s head from in front before walking around
behind the couch to fire another directly into his head. Trying to crawl away,
Kit endured an onslaught of 9 or 10 blasts before her sons ran out of
ammunition. Even though their mother wasn’t guilty of anything, the boys had
decided she would be unable to do well without her husband’s income. (And then
again, she might tell on them if spared.)
The only remaining ammo was bird
shot they had to go back to the car for to complete the execution, taking time
to fire into their knee caps to make it look like a “gang hit. Then they carefully (?) picked up the shot
shells and other debris placing it in a garbage bag to drop off in the dumpster
of a nearby gas station. Then, satisfied they went to a late night movie before
returning home and calling the police to report finding their parents dead.
Who
could believe that two such fine-looking young men from a prominent and
successful family could possibly be involved in a murder of such sheer brutality
with their own loving parents as victims?
And that very question explains
why they were not treated as suspects by the investigators, why two juries with
a mountain of evidence failed to find a clear “guilty” verdict and then just
barely getting a conviction – without a death sentence -- three long years
after the crime, finally inviting suspicion only when it was noticed that they had gone on a buying spree with
one million dollars of their father’s money in the first six months!
The Menendez boys were no geniuses;
nor can we claim brilliance on the part of the investigators for that matter.
During the initial questioning by detectives, Lyle noticed they had missed one
of the expended shot shells in their “careful” clean-up; he could see it just
under the chair the detective was sitting on. He managed to pick it up minutes
later. (They shouldn’t have been inside the “secure” crime scene to begin
with.) Most basic of oversights was the failure to test the boys’ for gunshot
residue – a routine which would be done just to eliminate them from the list of
possibilities, even if not seen as suspects. After the expenditure of at least
20 shotgun shells, they would have been literally covered with powder residue,
to say nothing of possible blood splatter. Later it would be learned that Eric
had confessed the crime to his counselor – which would have been “protected
testimony” of course – but when Lyle threatened the life of the Doctor, the
legal umbrella of protection was broken. Only with the final of the three
juries were portions of the doctor’s tapes belatedly admitted.
When the Menendez brothers
fabricated a new story and testified that they had killed in self defense after
a “lifetime of parental abuse”, they once again managed to elicit sufficient jury
sympathy to avoid death. They got “life without possibility of parole.”
Searching into the background of
this American family, it becomes clear that from the very beginning in their
New Jersey days Lyle and Eric Menendez developed a relationship so unusual it
must have been more than obvious to those around them – to the point where they
operated as from a single identity. By theft and deception they lived a
lifestyle far beyond any allowance from their demanding father and indulgent
mother. They may have used a shotgun instead of a hatchet, but like Lizzy
Borden a century earlier, it was hatred for an “overbearing” father that led to
mayhem within the walls of family.
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