Audition

by Barbara Walters

  She recovered and we went on with the interview, but her wrenching outburst stayed with me for a long time. Here was a woman who was going to spend at least the next thirteen years in prison and didn’t care about getting out because “he” was not going to be there. I had rarely witnessed that kind of love and was very moved by it.

  Harris put her life to good use in prison. In a subsequent interview she and I did at Bedford Hills, she showed me a child-care center she’d helped set up where the inmates could read stories or play games with their children when they came to see them. Along with a visiting nun, she taught a class in prison parenting for pregnant inmates and young mothers so they could cope better on the “outside.” With the nun, she also started the Children of Bedford Foundation to give better educational opportunities to the children of prisoners. Some of those children went to college and even on to law school.

  Harris suffered a heart attack in jail, and the Jean Harris Defense Committee intensified its efforts to secure her pardon. I signed every petition that came my way and joined the letter-writing campaign to Governor Cuomo, who still refused to release her.

  Was I the impartial journalist? Yes, in terms of my interviews with Harris, but on my own time definitely not. I cared about her and thought her fifteen-year prison sentence was an injustice. ABC, however, and rightly so, did not support my personal involvement in the pardon effort, and soon after a newspaper columnist wrote about my participation, ABC News told me that I was no longer permitted to report on the case. I continued to visit Harris from time to time, but I was silenced professionally for the last nine long years of her incarceration, during which she had another heart attack.

  It was not until December 1992, when Harris was in the hospital about to undergo quadruple bypass heart surgery, that Governor Cuomo finally pardoned her, citing her health. She was sixty-nine years old by then, and had spent twelve years in prison. Finally she was a free woman, and so was I to talk on camera with her. Our last interview was in March 1993, three months after her heart surgery and her release from prison.

  Harris looked tired but had lost none of her spunk. Her answer to my question about what she had found hardest to adjust to in prison was not the strip searches she had been subjected to every time she had a visitor but rather “the lack of logic.” For example, her visitors’ names had to be submitted in advance and checked off a list by a guard before they could visit her. But some visitors were turned away or had to wait a very long time because the guard couldn’t find their names on the list. “I kept saying to them, ‘Please let me have the list and I’ll arrange it alphabetically for you,’” she said. “And the guard said to me, ‘It won’t do any good because they don’t come alphabetically.’”

  When I asked her whether she felt the years in prison had been wasted, she answered, “Not for a minute.” She said she was much stronger than when she’d entered prison. “I didn’t have a very strong will to live when I went in,” she said, “but I have a very strong will to live now.”

  What impressed me the most was the contrast between this interview and our first one, when she’d broken down at the mention of Tarnower’s name and said she thought about him all this time.

  “Yes, I did, but I don’t anymore. That was twelve years ago, and it’s over and it was very painful. What I think about now is all the things that ought to be done to improve the lives of children in this country, and that consumes me.”

  Harris, whose story was portrayed in several books and movies (the most recent was the 2006 HBO film Mrs. Harris, starring Annette Bening and Ben Kingsley), is in her eighties now and lives in an assisted living home in Connecticut. She is close to her two sons by a former marriage, pre-Tarnower, and has friends. She still raises funds for the Children of Bedford Foundation. I send a contribution. She sent me a little note in the spring of 2007, asking warmly: “When are you going to stop working? And so hard? I’m pretty rickety—wish I had your energy.” I hope that her life is peaceful. I think she has a right to that.

  Mark David Chapman was not the most famous murderer I interviewed, but he had certainly murdered the most famous person—John Lennon. I had tried for over a decade to get an interview with him, writing him a letter on each anniversary of Lennon’s death. It took twelve years for Chapman to say yes and another few months for the warden, after determining that Chapman was now sane enough, to also agree. I finally met with Chapman in 1992 at Attica Correctional Facility in upstate New York.

  What made Chapman’s interview worth such a long-term effort was that no one had ever heard in his own words why he killed Lennon. There had been no trial and so no testimony because Chapman had instructed his lawyer to withdraw his insanity plea and instead plead guilty. The court had sentenced him to twenty years to life and, for his own protection, he was being held in an isolated part of the prison. This first television interview with him in 1992, along with the simultaneous publication of a book about him, would break his silence.

  I remember Chapman, somber, wearing glasses, shuffling toward me in leg irons, his hands cuffed, wearing the bright orange prison jumpsuit I had become very familiar with, and flanked by two burly prison guards. (Prison guards always seem to be burly.) When he reached the small, bare room the authorities always seemed to assign me and my crew in every prison, he seemed relieved, as would every murderer I interviewed, to sit down and have his cuffs and shackles removed. Like all the others he was eager to talk. But while Chapman was cogent, very quiet, and seemed perfectly sane, what he said was not.

  His hatred of Lennon had begun, he told me, when he chanced upon a book about the former Beatle in a library and learned that Lennon was living in an elegant landmark building in New York. “I got very, very angry,” he told me. “I used to love the Beatles. Their idealism meant a lot to me and I saw that, at the time, as a sellout.” Chapman, who had been abused as a child, suffered from depression, and had once attempted suicide, bought a gun and a ticket to New York from Hawaii, determined to kill Lennon. “Why?” I asked him. His reply: “John Lennon fell into a very deep hole, a hole so deep inside me that I thought by killing him I would acquire his fame.”

  On the night of December 8, 1980, Chapman waited outside Lennon’s apartment building for Lennon to return from a recording session. Chapman had, in his pocket, a gun and his “bible,” J. D. Salinger’s A Catcher in the Rye, whose alienated central character Chapman identified with. Somehow Chapman thought killing Lennon would make him feel better. “I see this real somebody who I perceived, at the time, to be a phony,” Chapman told me. “My nobody was wanting to strike down that somebody.”

  This was a man who was deemed mentally sound enough to withdraw his insanity defense?

  Chapman told me he had asked Satan to give him the power to kill John Lennon. “I turned to Satan, because I knew I wouldn’t have the strength to kill a man on my own,” he said. “So I went through what I thought was an appropriate Satanic ritual and took off all my clothes and chanted and screamed and howled.” Satan spoke to him later as Lennon’s car drew up. “I heard this voice saying, over and over, ‘Do it, do it, do it, do it.’”

  And he did.

  Chapman pumped four bullets into John Lennon as the former Beatle walked toward his apartment building. Chapman then leaned against the building and read A Catcher in the Rye until the police arrived and put him in the back of a police car. He didn’t seem perturbed by the sight of Lennon lying bleeding on the sidewalk, but was very disturbed by the policeman who was holding Lennon’s head and cursing him. “It frightened me to death,” Chapman told me. “Here’s this police officer mouthing these horrible words at me.”

  Lennon died in the back of a police car as he was being rushed to the hospital. Chapman went to prison, where, he told me, a priest standing outside the prison walls finally expelled his satanic demons through an exorcism.

  Chapman concluded the interview by apologizing to Lennon’s wife, Yoko Ono, and their son, Sean, who was five years old at the ti
me of the murder. “I’m sorry and I mean that,” he said. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”

  Our interview was finished, but when the guards put the handcuffs and the leg irons back on and started walking him back toward his cell, he kept turning his head back toward me and saying, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.” His words echoed down the long hall and faded as he neared his cell. I can still hear them.

  A great many people were upset by this interview, and after we ran it, ABC felt that I had to be very careful about security. I was told to come into the building through a separate entrance because there were so many protesters outside, people who loved John Lennon and were furious that we had given his assassin airtime. But the interview didn’t do Chapman any good. As of this writing, he is still in Attica, where he is said to have become an evangelical Christian. He has been denied parole four times, due partly to Yoko Ono, who, in November 2006, nearing the twenty-sixth anniversary of her husband’s death, wrote in the New York Times: “I don’t know if I am ready yet to forgive the one who pulled the trigger.” Nor, it appears, are others. During one parole board hearing, close to two thousand people signed an online petition threatening retribution were he to be released. Chapman is safer in prison.

  Finally, the Menendez brothers, who came to me in 1996 via Leslie Abramson, their fiery defense lawyer. The public’s fascination with lurid crimes had spawned Court TV in 1991 and like millions of other Americans, I closely followed on my television set the drama Leslie was staging in a Los Angeles courtroom. Her client, Erik Menendez, and his brother, Lyle, represented by another attorney, were charged with first-degree murder for brutally shooting their parents in 1989 while they were watching television in their opulent Beverly Hills home. Erik had been eighteen and Lyle twenty-one at the time of the double murders. Their joint trial began four years later, but Abramson tried to recapture the brothers’ youth by dressing them in sweaters and khaki pants every day of the trial so that they looked younger than their ages. What a drama. We all watched the “boys,” as Leslie always called them, cry when they testified about the sexual abuse they claimed their father had inflicted on them, and their shared fear that if they told, he would kill them. Instead they killed him and their mother. It was clearly self-defense, Leslie laid out in the course of the five-month trial. The jury ended up deadlocked between those who believed her and pressed for a verdict of manslaughter, and those who pressed for first-degree murder, convinced that the boys had killed their parents out of greed to get their hands on the family fortune. The mistrial was a spectacular, though temporary, victory for Leslie and her “boys.” Their second trial began in 1995 and lasted seven months.

  I talked with Leslie throughout both trials. She was a piece of work, small with masses of curly blond Orphan Annie hair and a tiger both inside and outside the courtroom. She infuriated some lawyers and journalists with her shenanigans, but she and I hit it off. Leslie was in the process of trying out for a TV show of her own with one of the networks (it never came to pass), and I gave her some suggestions. What I ultimately wanted, of course, as did absolutely every television journalist, was an interview with the brothers. But I also genuinely liked her. My relationship with her served me well when, after the second trial ended, she advised Erik and Lyle to go with me for the interview. By then the Menendez brothers had been found guilty of first-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

  This is why they were convicted. The brothers already had two strikes against them. One, the spending spree they had gone on after their parents’ deaths with their father’s life insurance policy (Lyle had even bought a gray Porsche 911 Carrera for sixty-four thousand dollars). Second, Erik’s confession of the murders to his therapist, which was overheard by the therapist’s girlfriend and eventually reported to the police. Third, and the tipping point in the second trial, a sharp change in the attitude of the judge. Stung by the criticism of Judge Ito in the controversial O. J. Simpson trial, which had ended in Simpson’s acquittal just a week before, the judge in the Menendez trial this time didn’t allow television cameras in the courtroom. He also limited testimony from family members and expert witnesses on the boys’ claim of sexual abuse on the grounds that no evidence of such abuse had been proved in the first trial. That gave the jury only two options: first-degree murder or acquittal. With self-defense no longer an option, first-degree murder it was. Leslie Abramson was so upset about the conviction and so exhausted by the trials that for a period of time she left criminal law. Still, she urged Erik and Lyle to give me their first and exclusive interview.

  I talked with the Menendez brothers in the Los Angeles County Jail. It was the first time Erik and Lyle had sat next to each other outside the courtroom and told their stories. What awful stories they were.

  On the night of the murders, Erik told me, “I said to myself, I’m never going to let him touch me again, and just before the shootings, my dad told me to get to my room and that he would be there in a minute and…there was going to be sex and it was like an explosion in my mind.”

  I reminded him that he and his brother had already bought shotguns, but Erik insisted that the guns were for their own protection. “When it was revealed I had told Lyle the secret, my dad said to Lyle, ‘You’re going to tell everyone and I’m not going to let that happen.’”

  But why had they killed their mother? Because, the brothers said, she knew and did nothing. “There was anger on my part,” said Lyle. “My mother was aware and had to lie to herself about my father.” Said Erik: “She told me that she knew, that she had known all my life what my father was doing…At that point I just saw Dad and Mom as the same person. I saw them as a single person.”

  So they shot their parents and, with their inheritance, went shopping. “There are people who think you are spoiled brats, that you are evil, that you are monsters. What do you say to them?” I asked. And Erik responded with what became my favorite line. “I’m just a normal kid,” he said. “Oh, Erik,” I said back to him. “You’re a normal kid…who killed his parents!?”

  The interview took place just before the formal sentencing and the subsequent decision as to which state prison or prisons the brothers would be placed in. They were very anxious to be imprisoned together. “The family that Erik and I grew up in, we had to be there for each other throughout, and it really created a bond that gets us through a very rough period,” said Lyle. Erik seemed terrified at the possibility of separation. “If we’re not put in the same prison, there is a good probability that I will never see him again. With everything taken away, it would be the last they could take.” But their pleas didn’t sway the authorities. Lyle was sent to the California Correctional Institution near Tehachapi, and Erik to the California State Prison in Sacramento County. “I gather you know the disaster that occurred a few weeks ago,” Erik wrote me in October 1996. “Lyle and I were separated. I won’t dwell on this unfortunate and cruel decision that was made by whatever powers that be. I am sad.” The brothers remain in separate prisons to this day.

  This was not the first letter I received from Erik. Almost from the time I interviewed him, he had begun to write to me. At first I didn’t answer, but his letters were so intelligent and he seemed in such emotional pain, stressing again and again how tortured he was by what he had done, that I began to answer him. He told me he had received hundreds and hundreds of letters from people who had been abused by their parents. He tried to answer them and hoped he could do something to help them, though of course he couldn’t. He also had thoughts about prison reform, but the authorities were not interested, he said, and his views were getting him into trouble.

  Which brings me to an aside I find intriguing. While they were incarcerated, Erik and Lyle both married women on the outside who were among the hundreds, maybe thousands, who wrote to them during the trials and their subsequent years in prison. Lyle married, divorced in less than a year, and married again. Erik married in 1999 and, as of this writing, is still
married to one of his prison correspondents, Tammi Menendez. What makes these marriages particularly astonishing is that prisoners like Lyle and Erik are not allowed conjugal visits. In plainer English—no sex. So when Erik wrote to me in 2002, three years after his marriage, and suggested that I might want to do an interview with Tammi, I immediately answered that yes, I did. Erik said that his wife was very afraid of talking—she had been asked to leave her volunteer job when her colleagues found out she was Mrs. Erik Menendez—but he would tell her that it was a good idea. He kept hoping and trying to get his case reopened, this time using the restricted material relating to his parental abuse. Perhaps he felt an interview with the sympathetic Tammi would help win him a new trial. So I flew to California to meet Tammi. Ten years Erik’s senior, twice married and a mother of two daughters (one grown and one six years old), Tammi was fragile, blond, very pretty, and shy. After we got to know each other a bit, we went together to visit Erik in prison.

  It was a bizarre meeting. I had been in enough prisons by then to know to bring quarters for the vending machine, and we sat there, the three of us, eating hamburgers and having a conversation as if we were in McDonald’s. I remember thinking how well Erik looked. He had been incarcerated for twelve years by then, but he was tanned and fit. It turned out he was a night janitor in the prison and by day worked out with plastic bags filled with water as weights. He and Tammi were very sweet together. They could hold hands during the visit, but no other contact was allowed.

  I later interviewed Tammi outside the prison. (We couldn’t film the couple together because on-camera interviews with inmates weren’t allowed.) Tammi told me that it was during the brothers’ first, televised trial that her “heart went out to Erik,” that she “could understand what he went through.” Had she been abused herself? I asked. “In my marriage I was emotionally starved,” she said. “He was just not there for me at all.” (Tammi would later disclose in a book about her relationship with Erik that her then husband had been molesting her older daughter, his stepdaughter. He subsequently committed suicide.)