Word: menendezes
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...announced last week that Edward James Olmos would play the father in The Beverly Hills Murders, the TV-movie version of the Menendez murder case. Here is a speculative look at an entire ensemble, with actual excerpts from the only slightly overwrought descriptions of the roles producers have provided to agents...
That question-and-answer sequence is remarkable, partly because it is not especially bizarre or lurid. At least not by the standards of the Southern California trial it comes from. Other testimony last week moved some jurors to tears, as Lyle Menendez described how, when he was seven years old, he had been forced to perform oral sex on his father and later had been sodomized with a toothbrush. Lyle, now 24, and his brother Erik, 21, are seeking to explain why they burst into the television room of the family's $5 million Beverly Hills mansion on the night...
...trial is testing the limits of the so-called battered-child-syndrome defense. (A variant, the battered-wife defense, is sometimes used by women who kill abusive husbands.) The Menendez brothers contend that they killed their parents not to avenge years of sexual and emotional torture -- that would be no legal justification -- but in self-defense. Even though Jose and Kitty were sitting placidly watching television? Yes. The law sometimes recognizes self- defense pleas from people who are not under attack but who reasonably fear imminent death unless they get their potential assailants first. The battered- child-syndrome defense holds...
...Menendez case originally looked much simpler. When Jose, 45, a Cuban refugee who had become the wealthy chief of a music- and video-distribution business, and Kitty, 44, a onetime beauty queen, were gunned down, the first suspicion was of a Mafia hit. But the mangled condition of the bodies argued for a motive of hatred rather than business. Though they pretended to discover the bodies, Lyle, then 21, and Erik, 18, did not put on a very convincing show of grief; they went on a $700,000 spending spree with the insurance money. In March 1990, Judalon Smyth told...
...Menendez trial explores the limits of filial impiety...