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Most damaging was the audiotape of a therapy session the brothers had with Dr. Jerome Oziel on Dec. 11, 1989. On that 61-minute tape, which the defense struggled for three years to suppress, Lyle said they had killed Kitty to put her "out of her misery" over her loveless marriage, making a joint decision that Jose "should be killed" because of "what he's doing to my mother." Hoping to discredit Oziel, defense lawyers offered extensive testimony from / the married therapist's former lover. "The defense proved that Dr. Oziel was a philanderer," Bozanich said. "They did not prove that Dr. Oziel could not work a tape recorder."
Bozanich dismissed the defense team's psychiatrists, child-abuse therapists and forensics experts as "spin doctors." But the prosecution's decision not to hire its own experts leaves all the defense's witnesses virtually undisputed. Most persuasive was Dr. William Vicary, a psychiatrist who specializes in sex offenders and has evaluated 750 accused murderers. After spending 88 hours with Erik, Vicary concluded that Erik had been the victim of sexual abuse. Asked why Erik had not spoken of the abuse until almost a year after the shootings, Vicary answered, "It's very common for people who have been molested to not come forward with that information. It's a dirty secret. There are powerful feelings of shame, self-blame, humiliation." Similarly, Stuart Hart, a professor of psychology at Indiana University, concluded after 60 hours of interviews with Lyle that the older brother had been "programmed" to keep the scandal quiet.
The court of public opinion is evenly divided on the brothers' fate. Callers to Court TV, which has devoted 600 hours to the trial, split on the question of whether they believed the brothers or the prosecution; so did a group assembled for Dateline NBC. Now it's up to the only viewers who count -- the jurors -- to decide.