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The brothers languished in Los Angeles County jail for three years, while the California courts argued over the admissibility of the tapes as evidence. In July a final ruling enabled the prosecution to use the tapes and cleared the way for a trial. Only then did the Menendezes admit to the killings and begin spinning their story of abuse and terror: Lyle first, for nine days ending last Friday; Erik testifies this week. At the request of defense lawyer Leslie Abramson, who did not want to parade the same witnesses to tell the same stories in two successive trials, the brothers are being tried simultaneously before two separate juries. The juries listen to the same evidence, except when testimony concerns only one brother. Then, the jury that will decide the fate of the other leaves the courtroom.
Lyle has been painting a picture of Jose and Kitty as monsters who ran their sons' lives in the tiniest detail, crushing any aspirations to independence by handing out cruel punishments for trivial offenses. Much worse, he testified, when he was seven, Jose "would be in the bathroom, and he'd put me on my knees. He'd guide me in all my movements, and I'd have oral sex with him." Also, "he used objects, a toothbrush, some sort of utensil brush . . . he'd take my pants off, lay me on the bed. He'd have a tube of Vaseline, and he'd just play with me." Worse yet, "he raped me." Lyle testified that he took out some of his rage by violating Erik with a toothbrush. On the stand, he sobbingly apologized to Erik -- a display the prosecution tried to paint as a bathetic phony.
By Lyle's own testimony, his father's sexual abuse stopped when he was eight -- 13 years before the killings. Kitty, though, or so Lyle said, continued to bathe him "everywhere" and invite him into her bed and instruct him to touch her "everywhere" until he was 13. From then on, he said, he avoided her bed, but "we had arguments over that for a long time -- my whole life, really." On Tuesday, Aug. 15, during one loud argument, Kitty ripped off Lyle's toupee in front of Erik, who allegedly had not known his older brother was bald.
And that, if Lyle is to be believed, started the fatal sequence. Moved by his brother's pain and embarrassment over the toupee incident, Erik impulsively confessed to Lyle that Jose was continuing his sexual abuse of the younger brother. Two days later, said Lyle, he confronted Jose and told his father to leave Erik alone, which started three days of escalating arguments. Jose, according to Lyle, told him, "What I do with my son is my own business. Don't throw your life away. Stay out of it." Lyle interpreted that and some later remarks by his father, he said, as threats to kill his sons to prevent an exposure that would ruin his hoped-for political career (Jose nursed an ambition to become the first Cuban-born U.S. Senator).