Word: menendezes
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...best defense lawyers money can buy -- and all those involved (even the minor players) act as if they are characters in the first draft of a convoluted screenplay desperately in need of a rewrite. Thus it has been several miserable months for the prosecutors in charge of the Menendez murder investigation; they are fielding two young millionaires, charges of patricide, disputed psychotherapy records and flamboyant defense attorneys claiming that vital evidence is inadmissible. And now the key witnesses are behaving like fruitcakes before the trial even begins...
...savagery of the crime and the stature of the victims guaranteed headlines from the start. Jose Menendez, a successful video mogul who ran Live Entertainment Inc., and his wife Kitty were found dead in the TV room of their Beverly Hills mansion last year, their faces blown off and bodies mangled by 14 blasts from two 12-gauge shotguns. But the story didn't make the cover of PEOPLE until seven months later, when the suspects were finally arrested. They turned out to be not a couple of Mob gunmen, as first thought, but the Menendezes' swaggering sons: Lyle...
...boys sit in a county jail not far from skid row, tans fading, while their lawyers battle over whether prosecutors can introduce tapes or notes of confidential conversations between the Menendez boys and their psychotherapist. A lower court ruled the tapes were admissible, but the California Supreme Court stayed the decision and is expected to issue its ruling next month. So far, crime fans and predatory screenwriters waiting to learn how the story ends have had to content themselves with a steamy drama playing outside the courtroom, as the details emerge about how police knew to look for those tapes...
...none of this was conclusive -- not even the shotgun shell casing found in Lyle's jacket -- until a mysterious witness emerged. An informant told police that psychotherapist Jerome Oziel had tapes and notes of his sessions with the Menendez boys in which they confessed to the crime. The informant added that she overheard the confessions from the doctor's waiting room. Police seized the tapes and arrested Lyle; three days later, Erik turned himself...
...Vanity Fair by reporter Dominick Dunne; in the article she explains that Oziel hypnotized her over the phone into falling in love with him. Two weeks ago she filed a lawsuit charging that Oziel drugged and raped her and later forced her to eavesdrop on his session with the Menendez boys so she could call the police in case they grew violent...