Menendez Jury Hears Tape of Questioning : Trial: The brothers dodge some implicating points but falter on others. The recording was made months before their arrest for murders of parents.

Meeting with detectives a month after killing their parents, Lyle and Erik Menendez lied and dodged questions that could have implicated them in the slaying, according to audiotapes played Thursday at the brothers’ murder trial.

Speaking with Beverly Hills police at the home of relatives in New Jersey, Lyle Menendez--who now claims he and his brother were the victims of long-term abuse--was asked if he had been “involved in” anything that would have led to homicide.

“You know, there was no pressure building up to this as far as Erik and I were concerned,” he said.

In a separate session an hour later, Erik Menendez asked officers: “You think it could have been someone they knew?”

Listening Thursday to the muddled tapes, following along with a transcript, neither Lyle Menendez, 25, nor Erik Menendez, 22, displayed any emotion in court.

The brothers are charged with first-degree murder in the Aug. 20, 1989, shotgun slayings of their parents--Jose Menendez, 45, a wealthy entertainment executive, and Kitty Menendez, 47. The parents were shot in the TV room of the family’s Beverly Hills mansion.

Prosecutors contend that the brothers killed out of hatred and greed, and are seeking the death penalty. The defense concedes the killings but claims they were an act of self-defense after years of physical, mental and sexual abuse.

Two juries are hearing the case, one for each brother, and the tapes--recorded Sept. 17, 1989, at the home of the brothers’ aunt and uncle--were played for the separate juries.

Defense attorneys had objected to the playing of the recordings, saying they contain too much irrelevant material. But Van Nuys Superior Court Judge Stanley M. Weisberg sided with prosecutors, who said the tapes are strong evidence of the brothers’ “consciousness of guilt.”

Beverly Hills Police Detectives Thomas Linehan and Leslie Zoeller were at the house to interview the aunt and uncle in a search for clues. But the brothers showed up unexpectedly, so detectives interviewed them as well--treating them not as suspects but as aggrieved crime victims.

Talking to Erik Menendez, Zoeller said, “We’re not on the opposite side of you,” adding, “We’re not--we’re not trying to--to nail you or anybody, you know.”

Dragnet-like, he added: “We have to go with the facts, basically.”

The facts, Erik Menendez said, were that he and his brother had been at the movies and a food festival, and had come home to the smell of smoke and the sight of their parents dead in the den.

Sticking to the same alibi that he and his brother had given police hours after the shootings, Erik Menendez said they had gone to Century City to see “License to Kill.” But it was sold out, so they saw “Batman,” he said.

After the movie, Erik Menendez said, the brothers went to a food festival in Santa Monica, then returned home to retrieve a fake ID he used to get in bars--the same story the brothers told the month before.

But when the officers asked Erik Menendez in New Jersey what name was on the fake ID, he never answered. “No, no, no, no, no, no,” he said. “It was a--it was a--one of my friend’s IDs. It--it--it’s an ID that just--just looks like me.”

Prosecutors allege that Erik Menendez had used the ID to buy shotguns in San Diego two days before the killings and that the brothers used the guns to kill their parents.

Erik Menendez did not volunteer those details to the investigating officers, but he did say he had a vivid memory of coming upon the scene in the den.

“Every day I remember the smoke,” he said. “And, ah, probably will for a long time. It, ah, and it was just, ah, from what I remember, it was like--like my mom burned something in the kitchen.

“It was just a slow haze,” he went on. “The room was dark yellow. It was like a full, slick haze and sitting there, from what I remember, and it smelled like, I remember, like it immediately smelled to me like it was gun smoke, obviously, when I saw them.”

Lyle Menendez also said he smelled smoke, and Zoeller testified Thursday that he thought that odd, because gun smoke dissipates quickly.

It increased his suspicions of the brothers “somewhat,” Zoeller said, although they remained free for months, until their psychologist’s lover told police in March, 1990, that the brothers had confessed to the therapist. They were taken into custody days later.

It was in the New Jersey interviews that police learned that Beverly Hills psychologist L. Jerome Oziel had been counseling the brothers. Erik Menendez said he had been seeing the therapist and “probably (was) gonna still see him.”

Oziel, the chief prosecution witness, wrapped up six days of testimony Wednesday. He said Lyle and Erik Menendez confessed to him on Oct. 31 and Nov. 2, 1989.

Originally, Erik Menendez went to see Oziel because he had been implicated in a pair of burglaries in Calabasas in 1988. Erik Menendez also did charity work after the burglaries and ruminated about that in his conversation with detectives in New Jersey:

“When I was young, I used to love everything,” he said. “I couldn’t break a branch off a tree, a leaf off a tree or something.

“I used to love everything. I wouldn’t want to hurt anything. And, ah, it seems that as one gets older, they have to experience things and life is colder. . . .”