Menendez Jurors Sure of Their Decisions

Forget about the allegations of incest and child abuse in the Menendez household, the weeks spent on gruesome crime scene reconstructions, and just about everything the expert witnesses said.

Five of the jurors who decided the guilt, and then the fate, of Lyle and Erik Menendez said none of the evidence that the lawyers emphasized most meant much to them as they convicted the brothers last month of first-degree murder and conspiracy, and as they spared them last week from execution.

They said they trembled, and some of them cried, as they decided Wednesday that Erik, 25, and Lyle, 28, should spend the rest of their lives in prison. They knew their decision to spare the brothers from the death penalty might be second guessed. But each juror was convinced that they had done the right thing.

The jurors have shed light about their thoughts and described what went on inside the jury room in a series of interviews since Wednesday.

Unlike the jurors at the first Menendez trials, which ended two years ago in deadlock, these jurors didn’t break into cliques.

Because Superior Court Judge Stanley M. Weisberg ordered them sequestered during the day, they ate together, laughed to relieve the tension and watched videos in the jury room on the days that they cooled their heels while the lawyers wrangled over legal issues. They began to feel like family.

There was never any division, never any dissent, and not a single holdout, the jurors said. None of them believed the defense theory that the brothers killed because they were afraid. And no one believed that the brothers killed solely to get their hands on their parents’ millions.

Jurors methodically discussed the elements of the crime, and some said they were surprised when they concluded that they had no choice but to find the Menendez brothers guilty of first-degree murder.

“We looked at how much planning they did,” said Ted Doughty, a retired school principal from Encino. “There was so much planning, deliberation and conspiracy--all those legal terms fit right in. It became very clear in a legal sense that they had committed first-degree murder.”

Jurors already had decided the brothers’ guilt and expected to return verdicts the next day, when forewoman Leigh Valvo of Chatsworth suffered a heart attack and a pregnant juror was dismissed for medical reasons. Although they had to start over with two alternates, they finally closed a case that had stumped two previous juries--something that the retrial jurors find hard to believe.

“I’m amazed that the first jury, if they had the same evidence we had, could not reach a verdict,” said Joann Owensby of Northridge.

Jurors said that while some of them believed that the brothers might have been sexually abused, it never played a significant role in their decision-making.

“There were a few people who strongly believed that there was not sexual abuse; there were probably a couple that favored that there was,” said Lesley Hillings, a postal worker from Arleta. “I think the rest of us aren’t sure, and we’ll never know.”

Jurors did believe that the parents psychologically abused their sons. “We felt the parents were very controlling, demanding, that [the brothers] didn’t have a normal type childhood,” Hillings said.

Most felt that simple hatred, or the desire to free themselves from suffocating parental pressure, compelled the brothers to kill.

“I don’t think we’ll ever know what the actual motivation was,” said Bruce Seitz, a postal worker from Sylmar. “There is something about them wanting to be free.”

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The most convincing evidence of the Menendez brothers’ guilt, several jurors said, were their own voices captured on tape as they spoke about their parents’ slayings with police and with a Beverly Hills psychologist. During deliberations, they played the tapes several times, listening intently.

“When Lyle calls 911, he’s so real and so anguished,” Hillings said. “You’re sitting there listening to it, knowing he’s lying, but he’s so real.”

Some jurors also were disturbed by Lyle’s comment to Beverly Hills therapist L. Jerome Oziel that he missed his parents, adding, “I miss having my dog around, if I can make such a gross analogy.”

Lawyer Andrew Wolfberg of Santa Monica said: “It was a very cold statement, and I’m sure he regrets saying it. It really affected me. It was about the coldest thing I could hear someone say.”

A few jurors were prepared to give Lyle the death penalty, but Seitz persuaded them to choose life because Lyle was young and lacked a prior criminal record.

While jurors were more sympathetic toward Erik, they found enough holes in his 15 days of testimony to cast doubt on the molestation tale.

In the end, Hillings said, “It didn’t matter whether it happened,” because jurors found enough evidence of Erik’s premeditation on the tapes to lead them to first-degree murder.

The prosecution’s slick computer-generated reconstruction of the Aug. 20, 1989, shotgun slayings of Jose and Kitty Menendez--and the defense’s debunking of it as junk science--occupied three weeks of the trial but “about five minutes” of the deliberations, Hillings said.

The psychiatric experts also had little impact, jurors said.

Several jurors said they still consider Lyle, who did not testify, an enigma. And what occurred in the wealthy family that led to parricide will remain a mystery for jurors long after they resume their normal lives.

“The parents almost prepared them to kill them, lie about it and get away with it,” Wolfberg said.

“They taught them to win at all costs, and the more the defense said that, the more I realized it was a double-edged sword for them,” he added. “If you’re going to win at all costs, it doesn’t matter if you’re going to claim your father was a sexual predator.”