The Mansions of Limbo (5 page)

Three days earlier, Judalon Smyth had contacted the police in Beverly Hills and told them of the existence of audiotapes in the Bedford Drive office of Dr. Oziel on which the Menendez brothers had allegedly confessed to the murders of their parents. She also told police that the brothers had threatened to kill Oziel if he reported them. Lastly, she told them that the two twelve-gauge shotguns had been purchased at a sporting-goods store in San Diego. All of this information was unknown to the Beverly Hills police, after seven months of investigation. They obtained a subpoena to search all of Oziel’s locations. The tapes were found in a safe-deposit box in a bank on Ventura Boulevard.

Lyle’s arrest was reported almost immediately on the local Los Angeles newscasts. Among those who heard the news was Noel Nedli, a tennis-team friend from Beverly Hills High who was Erik Menendez’s roommate in a condominium
that Erik was leasing for six months at the Marina City Club Towers, next to the condominium that his brother had leased with his girlfriend, Jamie Pisarcik. 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. By a curious coincidence, Erik happened to telephone Nedli at almost the same moment Nedli was listening to the report of Lyle’s arrest on the radio. It was merely a routine checking-up-on-every-thing call, and Nedli realized at once that Erik did not know about Lyle’s arrest. He is reported to have said to Erik, “I hope you’re sitting down.” Then he said, “Lyle was just arrested.”

“Erik became hysterical. He was crying, the whole nine yards,” said a friend of Nedli’s who had heard the story from him. This friend went on to say that the immediate problem for Erik was to get out of Israel before he was arrested there. Accompanied by Heffernan, who was not aware of the seriousness of the situation, the two got on a plane without incident, bound for London. There they split up. Heffernan returned to Los Angeles. Erik flew to Miami, where several members on the Menendez side of the family reside. An aunt advised him to return to Los Angeles and turn himself in. Erik notified police of his travel plans and gave himself up at Los Angeles International Airport, where he was taken into custody by four detectives. He was later booked at the Los Angeles County Men’s Central Jail on suspicion of murder and held without bond.

According to Judalon Smyth, and the California Court of Appeals decision, she had stood outside the door of Dr. Oziel’s office and, unbeknownst to the Menendez brothers, listened to their confession and threats. Dr. Oziel has denied this.

•        •       •

Approximately a year before any of the above happened, Judalon Smyth told me, she telephoned Jerome Oziel’s clinic, the Phobia Institute of Beverly Hills, after having heard a series of tapes called
Through the Briar Patch
, which had impressed her. She was then thirty-six, had been married twice, and was desirous of having a relationship and a family, but she tended to choose the wrong kind of men, men who were controlling. The
Briar Patch
tapes told her she could break the pattern of picking the wrong kind of men in five minutes.

She says Oziel began telephoning her, and she found him very nice on the phone. She felt he seemed genuinely interested in her. After Oziel’s third call, she sent him a tape of love poems she had written and called
Love Tears.
She also told him she was in the tape-duplicating business. She found his calls were like therapy, and she began to tell him intimate things about herself, like the fact that she had been going to a professional matchmaker she had seen on television. “I was falling in love over the phone,” she said. “You don’t think someone’s married when he calls you from home at night.”

Eventually, he came to her house with two enormous bouquets.

“The minute I opened the door I was relieved,” she said. “I wasn’t attracted to him. 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. Oziel was forty-two at the time. “He kept trying to get physical right away. I said, ‘Look, you’re not my type. I’m not attracted to you.’ He said he just wanted a hug. I said, ‘Just because you know all this intimate stuff about me doesn’t mean …’ ”

“Finally I gave in. It was the worst sex I ever had in my life. To have good sex you either have to be in love or in lust. I wasn’t either. It was also awful the second time. The third time was better. I broke off with him four or five times between September and October. Then Erik Menendez came.”

Although Dr. Oziel had not seen any members of the Menendez family since Erik’s counseling had ended, when news of the murders was announced in August 1989, according to Smyth, he became consumed with excitement at his proximity to the tragedy. “Right away, he called the boys and offered his help.” At the time, the boys were hiding out in hotels, saying they thought the Mafia was after them. “Jerry would go to where the boys were. He was advising them about attorneys for the will, etc. He had an I’ll-be-your-father attitude.”

At the end of October, Smyth told me, Oziel got a call from Erik, who said he needed to talk with him. Erik came at four on the afternoon of Halloween, October 31, to the office at 435 North Bedford Drive. There is a small waiting room outside the office, with a table for magazines and several places to sit, but there is no receptionist. 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. Off the waiting room is a doorway that opens into a small inner hallway off which are three small offices. Oziel shares the space with several other doctors, one of them his wife, Dr. Laurel Oziel, the mother of his two daughters.

Once there, Erik did not want to talk in the office, so he and Oziel went for a walk. On the walk, according to Smyth, Erik confessed that he and his brother had killed
their parents. Lyle, who was at the Elm Drive house at the time, did not know that Erik was seeing Oziel for that purpose. Lyle did not know either that Erik had apparently also confessed to his good friend Craig Cignarelli, with whom he had written the screenplay called
Friends.

When Smyth arrived at the office, Erik and Oziel had returned from their walk and were in the inner office. According to Smyth, Oziel wanted Erik to tell Lyle that he had confessed to him. Erik did not want to do that. He said that he and Lyle were soon going to the Caribbean to get rid of the guns and that he would tell him then. The plan, according to Erik, Judalon Smyth told me, was to break down the guns, put them into suitcases, and dump the bags in the Caribbean. 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 police had searched only the cars in the courtyard in front of the house, not the cars in the garage. Subsequently, the boys had buried the guns on Mulholland Drive. Smyth says Dr. Oziel convinced Erik that the boys would certainly be caught if they were carrying guns in their luggage. He also persuaded him to call Lyle and ask him to come to the office immediately.

It took ten minutes for Lyle to get to the office from the house on Elm Drive. Smyth says he did not know before he got there that Erik had confessed. When he walked into the waiting room, he picked up a magazine and chatted briefly with Smyth, assuming that she was another patient. “Been waiting long?” he asked her. He also pushed the button to indicate to Oziel that he had arrived. Oziel came out and asked Lyle to come in.

According to the California Court of Appeals decision, Smyth says she listened through the door to the doctor’s meeting with the boys and heard Lyle become furious with
Erik for having confessed. She told me he made threats to Oziel that they were going to kill him. “I never thought I believed in evil, but when I heard those boys speak, I did,” she said.

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. “They did go to the theater to buy the tickets,” she said one time. Or, “The mother kept moving, which is why she was hit more.” Or, “If they just killed the father, the mother would have inherited the money. So they had to kill her too.” Or, “Lyle said he thought he committed the perfect murder, that his father would have had to congratulate him—for once, he couldn’t put him down.”

Judalon went on to say, and it is in the opinion of the California Court of Appeals, that she was frightened that she might be caught listening if the boys came out of the office. She went back to the waiting room. Almost immediately, the door opened. “Erik came running out, crying. Then Lyle and Jerry came out. At the elevator, I heard Jerry ask if Lyle was threatening him. Erik had already gone down. 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, 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. Fearing the boys might come after him, Oziel called his wife and told her to get the children and move out of the house. “Laurel and the kids went to stay with friends,” said Smyth. Oziel then moved into Smyth’s apartment, the ground floor of a two-family house in the Carthay Circle area of Los Angeles.

In the days that followed, Smyth told several people
what she had heard. She has her own business, an audio-video duplicating service called Judalon Sound and Light, in the Fairfax section of Los Angeles. Behind her shop, in which she also sells crystals, quartz, and greeting cards, there is a small office which she rents to two friends, Bruce and Grant, who also have a video-duplicating service. As self-protection, she told them that the Menendez boys had killed their parents. She also told her mother and father and her best friend, Donna.

Then Oziel set up another meeting with the boys. He told them on the second visit that everything they had told him was taped. According to Smyth, the original confession, on October 31, was not taped. What was taped was Oziel’s 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.

She said that Oziel convinced the boys “he was their only ally—that if they were arrested he would be their only ally. 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. He convinced them that if they had any hope of ever getting off, they needed him.”

Meanwhile, the personal relationship between Smyth and Oziel deteriorated. 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 doses of drugs and, during said time periods, manipulated and took advantage of Smyth, controlled Smyth, and limited Smyth’s 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 or about February 16, 1990, defendant Oziel “placed his hands around her throat attempting to choke her, and pulled her hair with great force. Subsequently, on the same day, Defendant Oziel forced Smyth to engage in an act of forcible and unconsented sexual intercourse.” According to the California Court of Appeals decision, approximately three weeks after the alleged attack, Smyth contacted the police in Beverly Hills to inform them about the confession she said the Menendez brothers had made to Oziel.

Oziel’s lawyer, Bradley Brunon, called Smyth’s allegations “completely untrue,” and characterized her behavior as “an unfortunate real-life enactment of the scenario in
Fatal Attraction
.… She has twisted reality to the point where it is unrecognizable.”

“The boys are
adorable.
They’re like two foundlings. You want to take them home with you,” said the defense attorney Leslie Abramson, who has saved a dozen people from death row. She was talking about the Menendez brothers. Leslie Abramson is Erik’s lawyer. Gerald Chaleff is Lyle’s.

“Leslie will fight to the grave for her clients,” I heard from reporters in Los Angeles who have followed her career. “When there is a murder rap, Leslie is the best in town.”

Abramson and Chaleff have worked together before.
“We’re fifty-fifty, but she’s in charge,” Chaleff said in an interview. They like each other, and are friends in private life. Abramson met her present husband, Tim Rutten, an editorial writer for the
Los Angeles Times
, at a dinner party at Chaleff’s home.

During the arraignment in the Beverly Hills courthouse, I was struck by the glamour of the young Menendez brothers, whom I was seeing face-to-face for the first time. They entered the courtroom, heads held high, like leading actors in a television series. They walked like colts. Their clothes, if not by Armani himself, were by a designer heavily influenced by Armani, probably purchased in the brief period of their independent affluence, between the murders and their arrest. Their demeanor seemed remarkably light-hearted for people in the kind of trouble they were in, as they smiled dimpled smiles and laughed at the steady stream of Abramson’s jocular banter. Their two girlfriends, Jamie Pisarcik and Noelle Terelsky, were in the front row next to Erik’s tennis coach, Mark Heffernan. Everyone waved. Maria Menendez, the loyal grandmother, was also in the front row, and aunts and uncles and a probate lawyer were in the same section of the courtroom. Several times the boys turned around and flashed smiles at their pretty girlfriends.