Erik Menendez Describes 7 Days Leading to Killings of Parents

His tales of childhood suffering behind him, Erik Menendez was dry-eyed Monday as he led the jury at his retrial through the dramatic events of the week he and brother Lyle shotgunned their millionaire parents to death in the family’s Beverly Hills mansion.

Those seven days in August, 1989, he testified, were an emotional roller coaster that carried Erik Menendez from suicidal depression to renewed hope.

He testified that he was consumed by despair when his father told him he would be living in the family home while he attended UCLA, which he said meant there would be no end to his father’s molestation. But later in the week, Erik added, his hopes soared in anticipation that his brother, Lyle, would confront their father and that he no longer would be sexually abused by Jose Menendez.

It was a week in which the brothers’ relationship with their father--and with a mother who Menendez said drowned her own misery in pills and drink--were strained to the breaking point.

By Thursday, his father threatened to kill him by tying him to a chair and beating him to death, he said. His mother said she hated him and wished he had never been born.

The brothers’ state of mind as they opened fire on their parents shortly after 10 p.m. on Aug. 20, 1989, is the crucial issue of the case, being tried for a second time before Superior Court Judge Stanley M. Weisberg. Erik and Lyle Menendez, ages 25 and 27, are charged with first-degree murder. The first trial ended in a deadlock.

The defense, seeking lesser manslaughter convictions, asserts that a profound fear, fed by a lifetime of abuse, drove the brothers to kill their parents under the misguided belief they would be killed first to hush up a family sex scandal.

Prosecutors claim the brothers killed to get their hands on their parents’ millions, then fabricated an uncorroborated story of abuse. Deputy Dist. Atty. David P. Conn is seeking the death penalty.

The week of Aug. 13 began with devastating news, Erik Menendez testified.

First, on Sunday, his father told him he would be living at home several nights a week, which meant to him “that the sex would continue.”

The next day, at a meeting in a restaurant, his father laid out his life plan for his sons, Menendez testified. It included moving the family to an island compound in Florida where Jose Menendez would set the brothers up in business and launch a U.S. Senate campaign.

“I just felt shattered,” Menendez testified. “My world was falling away, crumbling at that point. . . . I curled up on my bed and cried. I felt like I was dying.”

In desperation, he finally confided the molestation to his brother after witnessing an argument between Lyle and their mother in which she snatched Lyle’s toupee from his head.

“I’d had a big knot in my stomach since Sunday night,” Menendez testified. “I was very gloomy and felt sad for him. I wanted to commiserate, I guess. . . . I decided on the spur of the moment to tell him.”

Lyle, he said, promised to confront their father, which he did on Thursday, when Jose Menendez returned home from a business trip.

After the confrontation, Menendez said, his father threw him against his bed, shouting: “I warned you never to tell Lyle. Now Lyle’s going to tell everyone. It’s all your fault.”

He told the jury his father vowed “that he wasn’t going to let that happen.”

The most devastating blow, however, came later Thursday, when his mother told him she had known about the molestation all along, Erik Menendez said.

“ ‘Oh, I’ve known. I’ve always known. What do you think I am--stupid?’ ” he testified his mother told him after the family secret came out in the open.

“What did you feel?” defense attorney Barry Levin asked.

“Anguish. Rage. Shock. Hate,” Menendez said.

He said he ran from his mother, out of the family room, past the tennis court and pool, and into the guest house where Lyle was staying. She chased him, he said, shouting: “Get back here, you bastard.”

Menendez said he burst into the guest house, telling his brother, “She knows! She knows! She knows everything.”

His mother, he told the jury, chased him inside, screaming: “I hate you! I hate you! I wish you were never born. You’re the cause of all my miseries.”

Within hours, the brothers decided they needed to buy guns for protection.

On Friday, they drove to San Diego and bought two shotguns. On Saturday, they accompanied their parents on a fishing trip, but stayed on the boat’s bow to avoid them.

The next day, they killed their parents. Menendez is expected to testify about the shootings today.