The Mansions of Limbo (6 page)

They were told to rise. The judge, Judith Stein, spoke in a lugubrious, knell-like voice. The brothers smiled, almost smirked, as she read the charges. “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. How do you plead?”

“Not guilty, Your Honor,” said Erik.

“Not guilty,” said Lyle.

Later I asked a friend of theirs who believes in their innocence why they were smiling.

“At the judge’s voice,” she replied.

Leslie Abramson’s curly blond hair bounces, Orphan Annie style, when she walks and talks. She is funny. She is fearless. And she is tough. Oh, is she tough. She walked down the entire corridor of the Beverly Hills courthouse giving the middle finger to an NBC cameraman. “This what you want? 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
Exposé
, narrated by Tom Brokaw. Her passion for the welfare of the accused murderers she defends is legendary. She is considered one of the most merciless cross-examiners in the legal business, with a remarkable ability to degrade and confuse prosecution witnesses. “She loves to intimidate people,” I was told. “She thrives on it. She knows when she has you. She can twist and turn a witness’s memory like no one else can.” John Gregory Dunne, in his 1987 novel
The Red White and Blue
, based the character Leah Kaye, a left-leaning criminal-defense attorney, on Leslie Abramson.

“Why did you give the finger to the cameraman?” I asked her.

“I’ll tell you why,” she answered, bristling at the memory. “Because I was talking privately to a member of the Menendez family, and NBC turned the camera on, one inch from my face. I said, ‘Take that fucker out of my face.’ These people think they own the courthouse. They will go to any sleazoid end these days. So I said, ‘Is this what you want?’ That’s when I gave them the finger. Imagine, Tom Brokaw on a show like that.

“I do not understand the publicity of the case,” she continued, although of course she understood perfectly. “I mean, the president of the United States wasn’t shot.”

Before I could reply with such words as “patricide,” “matricide,” “wealth,” “Beverly Hills,” she had thought
over what she had said. “Well, I rate murder cases different from the public.” Most of her cases are from less swell circumstances. In the Bob’s Big Boy case, the only death-penalty case she has ever lost, her clients herded nine employees and two customers into the restaurant’s walk-in freezer and fired shotguns into their bodies at close range. Three died and four were maimed. One of those who lived had part of her brain removed. Another lost an eye.

“What’s the mood of the boys?” I asked.

“I can’t comment on my clients,” she said. “All I can say is, they’re among the very best clients I’ve ever had, as far as relating. Both of them. It’s nonsense, all this talk that there’s a good brother and a bad brother. Lyle is wonderful. They’re both adorable.”

In the avalanche of media blitz that followed the arrest of the Menendez brothers, no one close to Lyle and Erik was the object of more intense fascination and scrutiny than Craig Cignarelli, Erik’s tennis partner, with whom he had written the screenplay
Friends.
A family spokesperson told me that in one day alone Craig Cignarelli received thirty-two calls from the media, including “one from Dan Rather, ‘A Current Affair,’ ‘Hard Copy,’ etc., etc. I can’t remember them all. We had to hire an attorney to field calls.” The spokesperson said that “from the beginning it was presumed that Craig knew something.”

Craig, clearly enjoying his moments of stardom following the arrests of his best friend and best friend’s brother, talked freely to the press and was, by all accounts of other friends of the brothers, too talkative by far. In articles by Ron Soble and John Johnson in the
Los Angeles Times
, Craig said he was attracted to Erik by a shared sense that they were special. He recalled how they would drive out to
Malibu late at night, park on a hilltop overlooking the ocean, and talk about their hopes for the future, about how much smarter they were than everyone else, and about how to commit the perfect crime. They had nicknames for each other: Craig was “King,” and Erik was “Shepherd.” “People really looked up to us. We have an aura of superiority,” he said.

As the months passed, it was whispered that Erik had confessed the murders to Craig. This was borne out to me by Judalon Smyth. But he confessed them in an elliptical manner, according to Smyth, in a suppose-it-happened-like-this way, as if planning another screenplay. 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.

Craig’s loquaciousness gave rise to many rumors about the two boys, as well as about the possibility that a second screenplay by them exists, one that parallels the murders even more closely. Craig has since been requested by the police not to speak to the press.

At one point, Cignarelli was presumed to be in danger because of what he knew, and was sent away by his family to a place known only to them. An ongoing story is that a relation of the Menendez brothers threatened Craig after hearing that he had gone to the police. The spokesperson for Craig wanted me to make it clear that, contrary to rumors, Craig “never approached the police. The police approached Craig. 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. He also said that the deputy district attorney, Elliott Alhadeff, was satisfied that all the information on the confession tapes was known to Craig, so in the event that the tapes were ruled
inadmissible by the court he would be able to supply the information on the stand.

Sometime last January, two months before the arrests, the friendship between the two boys cooled. That may have been because Erik suspected that Craig had talked to the police.

Earlier that month, during a New Year’s skiing vacation at Lake Tahoe, Erik had met and fallen in love with Noelle Terelsky, a pretty blond student at the University of California in Santa Barbara from Cincinnati. The romance was instantaneous. “Erik’s not a hard guy to fall for,” said a friend of Noelle. “He’s very sweet, very sexy, has a great body, and is an all-around great guy.” Noelle, together with Jamie Pisarcik, Lyle’s girlfriend, visits the brothers in jail every day, and has been present at every court appearance of the brothers since their arrest. 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. Maria Menendez, Noelle, and Jamie are now living in the Menendezes’ Calabasas house, which has still not been sold.

Five months had passed since the arrest. Five months of hearings and deliberations to see whether the audiotapes of Dr. Jerome Oziel were admissible in the murder trial of Lyle and Erik Menendez. Police seizure of therapy tapes is rare, because ordinarily conversations between patients and therapists are secret. But there are occasional exceptions to the secrecy rule, one being that the therapist believes the patient is a serious threat to himself or others. Only the defense attorneys, who did not want the tapes to be heard,
had been allowed to participate in the hearings. The prosecution, which did want them to be heard, was barred. Oziel had been on the stand in private hearings from which the family, the media, and the public were barred. Judalon Smyth had also been on the stand for two days in private sessions, being grilled by Leslie Abramson. The day of the decision had arrived.

There was great tension in the courtroom. Noelle and Jamie, the girlfriends, were there. And Maria, the grandmother. And an aunt from Miami. And a cousin. And the probate lawyer. And others.

Then the Menendez brothers walked in. The swagger, the smirks, the smiles were all gone. And the glamour. So were the Armani-type suits. Their ever-loyal grandmother had arrived with their clothes in suit bags, but the bags were returned to her by the bailiff. They appeared in V-necked, short-sleeved jailhouse blues with T-shirts underneath. Their tennis tans had long since faded. It was impossible not to notice the deterioration in the appearance of the boys, especially Erik. His eyes looked tormented, tortured, haunted. At his neck was a tiny gold cross. He nodded to Noelle Terelsky. He nodded to his grandmother. There were no smiles that day.

Leslie Abramson and Gerald Chaleff went to Judge James Albracht’s chambers to hear his ruling on the admissibility of the tapes before it was read to the court. The brothers sat alone at the defense table, stripped of their support system. “Everybody’s staring at us,” said Erik to the bailiff in a pleading voice, as if the bailiff could do something about it, but there was nothing the bailiff could do. Everybody did stare at them. Lyle leaned forward and whispered something to his brother.

The fierce demeanor of Leslie Abramson when she returned to the courtroom left no doubt that the judge’s
ruling had not gone in favor of the defense. As the judge read his ruling to the crowded courtroom, Abramson, with her back to the judge, kept up a nonstop commentary in Erik Menendez’s ear.

“I have ruled that none of the communications are privileged,” said the judge. There was an audible sound of dismay from the Menendez family members. The tapes would be admissible. The judge found that psychologist Jerome Oziel had reasonable cause to believe that Lyle and Erik Menendez “constituted a threat, and it was necessary to disclose the communications to prevent a danger.” There was no doubt that this was a serious setback to the defense.

Abramson and Chaleff immediately announced at a news conference that they would appeal the judge’s ruling. Abramson called Oziel a gossip, a liar, and “less than credible.” Neither Judalon Smyth’s name nor her role in the proceedings was ever mentioned.

A mere eight days later, in a stunning reversal of Judge Albracht’s ruling, the 2nd District Court of Appeals blocked the release of the tapes, to the undisguised delight of Abramson and Chaleff. Prosecutors were then given a date by which to file opposing arguments. Another complication occurred when Erik Menendez, from jail, refused to provide the prosecution with a handwriting sample to compare with the handwriting found on forms for the purchase of two shotguns in San Diego, despite a warning by the court that his refusal to do so could be used as evidence against him. 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.

•        •       •

Since their arrest in March, Lyle and Erik Menendez have dwelt in the Los Angeles County Men’s Central Jail, in the section reserved for prisoners awaiting trial in heavily publicized cases. The brothers’ cells are not side by side. They order reading material from Book Soup, the trendy Sunset Strip bookshop. Erik has been sent
The Dead Zone
, by Stephen King, and a book on chess. They have frequent visits from family members, and talk with one friend almost daily by telephone. That friend told me that they have to pay for protection in jail. “Other prisoners, who are tough, hate them—who they are, what they’ve been accused of. They’ve been threatened.” He also told me they feel they have lost every one of their friends. Late in August, when three razor blades were reportedly found in Erik’s possession, he was put in solitary confinement, deprived of visitors, books except for the Bible, telephone calls, and exercise. That same week, Lyle suddenly shaved his head.

Los Angeles District Attorney Ira Reiner stated on television that one motive for the murders was greed. Certainly it is possible for a child to kill his parents for money, to wish to continue the easy life on easy street without the encumbrance of parental restrictions. But is it really possible for a child to kill, for merely financial gain, in the manner Kitty and Jose Menendez were killed? To blast holes into one’s parents? To deface them? To obliterate them? In the fatal,
coup de grâce
shot, the barrel of one shotgun touched the cheek of Kitty Menendez. You wonder if her eyes met the eyes of her killer in the last second of her life. In this case, we have two children who allegedly participated in the killing of each parent, not in the heat of rage but in a carefully orchestrated scenario after a long gestation period. There is more than money involved here.
There is a deep, deep hatred, a hatred that goes beyond hate.

The closest friend of the Menendez brothers, with whom I talked at length on the condition of anonymity, kept saying to me over and over, “It’s only the tip of the iceberg.” No amount of persuasion on my part could make him explain what the iceberg was. Months earlier, however, a person close to the situation mouthed but did not speak the word “incest” to me. 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. 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 Menendez’s body. But the subject continues to surface. Could it be possible that these boys were puppets of their father’s dark side? “They had sexual hatred for their parents,” one of the friends told me. This same person went on to say, “The tapes will show that Jose molested Lyle at a very young age.”

Is this true? Only the boys know. If it is, it could be the defense argument that will return them to their tennis court, swimming pool, and chess set, as inheritors of a $14 million estate that they could not have inherited if they had been found guilty. Karen Lamm, however, does not believe such a story, although it is unlikely that Kitty would have revealed to her a secret of that dimension. Judalon Smyth was also skeptical of this information when I brought up the subject of sexual abuse. She said she had heard nothing of the kind on Halloween afternoon when, according to the California Court of Appeals decision, she listened outside Dr. Oziel’s office door as Lyle and Erik
talked about the murders. She said that last December, almost two months after the October 31 confession to Oziel, which was not taped, the boys, feeling that the police were beginning to suspect them, voluntarily made a tape in which they confessed to the crime. In it, they spoke of their remorse. In it, apparently, they told of psychological abuse. But sexual abuse? Judalon Smyth did not hear this tape, and by that time Dr. Oziel was no longer confiding in her.