American Murder Houses

by Steve Lehto

  Shortly after, Lohan’s reps claimed that the brouhaha was caused by a misunderstanding. She had believed that the producers of Liz & Dick were going to pick up her expensive tab while she stayed at the Chateau during filming. She apparently settled the bill because it was reported in the news that Lohan was back at the Chateau Marmont, with the blessings of the owner, in the fall of 2012. Her legal problems were far from over, but at least she wasn’t banned from Hollywood’s hippest hotel, the place where John Belushi was killed.

  *Ron Harris and Michael Seiler, “John Belushi Dead in Hollywood,” Ottawa Citizen, March 6, 1982, reprinted from the Los Angeles Times.

  *Chateau Marmont, chateaumarmont.com

  *“Chateau Marmont Revisited,” Architectural Digest, December 1996.

  The Poor Little Rich Kids

  THE MENENDEZ FAMILY HOME

  1989

  722 North Elm Drive

  Beverly Hills, California 90210

  On August 20, 1989, Kitty and Jose Menendez watched The Spy Who Loved Me in the family room of their huge home in Beverly Hills. Kitty was forty-seven years old, Jose forty-four; he was an executive at a movie studio. Before Jose and Kitty Menendez had moved into the property, it had been rented by a variety of other people in the entertainment industry, including Elton John and Prince, for a rumored $35,000 per month. The two fell asleep on the couch in front of the television. Around ten o’clock that evening, someone walked into the living room of the mansion with a shotgun and began shooting the couple. Jose was shot several times, as was Kitty. The killer—or killers—then placed the shotgun barrel up against the back of Jose’s head as he lay on the floor and pulled the trigger. In all, the two were shot fourteen or fifteen times. It was gruesome; it was what investigators would call “overkill.” The murderers then went around the crime scene and carefully picked up the shotgun shells in an attempt to remove evidence from the scene. Neighbors who heard the shooting said the sound was muffled and did not seem like gunfire. It may be that the sound didn’t carry well, or it could have been that the neighborhood was normally so peaceful that no one expected shootings to happen there. The killers vanished without anyone seeing them.

  Kitty and Jose did not live alone in the house, although they were the only ones home that evening. They had two adult sons who still lived with them: Lyle and Erik. A few minutes before midnight, the victims’ adult children called 911 from the house and, clearly hysterical, barely managed to convey to the operator that someone had killed their parents. During the phone call, one son could be heard yelling at the other. A few minutes later, the police showed up at the house. As they approached the front door, the Menendez brothers came barreling out the door, running right past the police toward the street. There, in the grass by the curb, the two knelt down and sobbed. The police tried questioning them but they were incoherent and uncooperative. The police entered the house and found the bodies of Kitty and Jose, both dead from multiple gunshot wounds.

  In 1989, the Menendez murders would seem cut straight from a made-for-TV movie script. The crime would be the center of so much drama it would seem impossible to have actually happened the way it was portrayed in the media. The victims were gruesomely killed by shotgun blasts in their mansion in Beverly Hills. Lyle and Erik would eventually be tried for the murders and sentenced to spend the rest of their lives behind bars as a result. In between the murders and the convictions, there would be twists, turns, and wall-to-wall news coverage of anything to do with the Menendez brothers.

  Jose Menendez was an accountant by trade and worked his way up into management of a variety of different companies. The family lived in New Jersey until Jose was offered a job in the entertainment industry in California. His career thrived there too. The family settled in Beverly Hills and the boys, Joseph Lyle and Erik Galen, attended the best schools, traveled extensively, and lived lives of luxury. Erik had dreams of becoming a professional tennis player and often traveled to play in tournaments. Lyle attended Princeton but suffered from bad grades and disciplinary problems, and he wandered back to California. Neighbors noted a series of breakins around the time the Menendez brothers were both in town.

  When the police began investigating on the night of the murders, they quickly noticed that the home had not been robbed and there was no sign of forced entry. Still, they did not suspect the sons at first. They brought the two in for questioning as part of the investigation but could not get much information from them. Erik continued to remain distraught and broke down repeatedly whenever he was questioned about details of the murders. Lyle answered questions but claimed to know nothing about who might have wanted to kill his parents. Some of his answers were odd, though. He told investigators that the house was filled with smoke when they had entered it—even though the investigators never saw any smoke or sign of a fire.

  Was he referring to smoke from all the gunfire? If so, it meant they were present in the immediate moments after the gunfire ended. That would contradict the claim the brothers had made that they had come home two hours after neighbors had reported hearing the gunshots, which they had mistaken for the sound of firecrackers. And if they had arrived immediately after the shots were fired, why didn’t they see the gunmen or hear the shots? After more questioning, the brothers suggested to the police that the killing might have been a mob hit. The police let the brothers go and continued their investigation. The brothers claimed to be so confounded by the crime that they hired a retired police detective to investigate the murders as well.

  Perhaps believing they had gotten away with murder, the brothers then began spending their dead parents’ money. Jose had a $650,000 personal life insurance policy that named his two sons as beneficiaries. Just four days after the murders, the two spent $15,000 on Rolex watches and jewelry. They bought other expensive things: a $64,000 Porsche and two restaurants. Erik hired a tennis coach and promised him a $60,000 annual salary. They each rented expensive new apartments in the Marina City Towers in Marina del Rey.

  The two did not seem to be mourning. At the very least, they were handling the deaths of their parents quite well. They began traveling extensively, to Europe and the Caribbean, and when they were in town, they often drove their mother’s Mercedes. They managed to burn through a million dollars in the first six months after the murders and may have been disappointed to find out that their parents hadn’t been as rich as they had hoped. While Jose had owned a large portfolio of stock, the real estate owned by Kitty and Jose had been pledged as collateral for large bank loans. Experts suggested that the estate—which the Menendez brothers had hoped was worth tens of millions—might net the boys only $2 million each. But that was assuming they had nothing to do with the murders.

  The brothers were also surprised to learn that they wouldn’t be receiving an insurance payout through their father’s employer. Jose had been the subject of two life insurance policies taken out by the company. One was a “key man” policy that paid his employer a large amount of money if Jose died. The other was a $5 million policy for which Jose could name the beneficiary. When the company took out the two policies, Jose had to submit to a separate physical exam for each. He passed the first physical but hadn’t gotten around to taking the second examination before he was killed. As a result, the boys would receive nothing from Jose’s personal life insurance policy while the employer would receive $15 million for the key man policy.

  After watching the behavior of the sons, the investigators began looking a little more closely at them as possible suspects. They discovered that the boys had hired a computer expert to help them delete something from Kitty’s computer shortly after the murders. A friend said that one of the deleted files was a draft of a new will, which had not been as generous to the boys.

  Even though Lyle was spending money like a drunken sailor, he was having emotional trouble dealing with the recent events. He decided to talk to a psychologist about his problems. In one of the sessions he confessed to the murders. The psychologist su
ggested that Lyle should bring Erik in to participate in one of the counseling sessions. When he got there, Erik also admitted his role in the murders but then told the psychologist they would kill him if he told anyone what he had just learned. The psychologist continued meeting with the two on a few more occasions but made sure he kept notes and secretly recorded the sessions. During these meetings, the brothers discussed the murders at length with the psychologist.

  One day, during one of the sessions with the Menendez brothers, the doctor’s girlfriend sat in an adjoining room. She was waiting for the session to end so she could talk to the psychologist, and she couldn’t help but overhear what was happening in the office. The Menendez brothers were yelling at the psychologist. At one point, she heard one of the brothers threaten to kill the doctor. Although no violence came of it, she was worried and she called the police. Now law enforcement had evidence to support their growing suspicions.

  The police soon obtained tapes from the psychologist’s sessions, and it became clear to them that the Menendez brothers had killed their parents. Detectives soon hit the pavement, canvassing stores that sold shotguns, showing cashiers and salespeople photos of the Menendez brothers. Had anyone sold a shotgun to them recently? In San Diego County they found a store that had sold the brothers a pair of shotguns that fit the crime. The saleswoman would testify that Erik presented a fake ID to purchase a pair of Mossberg 12-gauge shotguns just two days before Kitty and Jose were murdered. The police decided to arrest the brothers. On March 8, 1990, Lyle was arrested at the mansion. Erik was out of the country but turned himself in three days later.

  The two still had a good amount of money left, so they hired the best attorneys money could buy. Erik hired Leslie Abramson, who specialized in defending death penalty cases, and reportedly paid her $750,000 for her services. Lyle’s attorney was reportedly also paid close to three quarters of a million dollars. He was famous too; he had recently defended the “Hillside Strangler.” The two would be tried together, but each would have his own jury. The court would have to decide which jury could hear evidence before any given witness testified. Sometimes both juries could hear the testimony; sometimes one jury would hear it while the other jury would get up and leave the courtroom. Simply shuffling the two juries would waste a huge amount of time.

  The case soon became a legal quagmire, even before the jury was impaneled. The prosecution wanted to use the tapes and notes from the sessions with the psychologist; defense counsel argued that the materials were doctor-patient privileged. The court made its ruling, which was appealed. The argument ended up in front of the California Supreme Court, which ruled that some of the sessions would be admissible in court—but not all. The Supreme Court ruled that the prosecution could play for the jury portions of the tapes where the brothers threatened the doctor to keep quiet. They would not be able to play the parts where the brothers had detailed how they had committed the murders. Like the Lizzie Borden case—where anyone who read the newspapers knew about evidence that was kept from the jury—most of America believed the Menendez brothers were guilty long before the trial had even started.

  One other oddity came to light before the trial. In an article for Vanity Fair, Dominick Dunne described a screenplay Erik had written with a friend that he had hoped to sell in Hollywood. Called Friends, it was the story of a man who kills his wealthy parents for their inheritance. After writing it, Erik’s mother typed the manuscript for him. To many, it looked like Erik had scripted the murder of his parents.

  The trial was held in the courtroom of the Honorable Stanley Weissberg, who had recently conducted the trial of the police officers accused of beating Rodney King. It was the verdict from that trial that had preceded the Los Angeles riots after the defendants—four LAPD officers who had been videotaped beating King on the roadside—had been acquitted. Before the Menendez trial began, attorneys for the brothers announced that they were not going to argue that the killings were done by someone else. They were going to admit that they had killed Kitty and Jose because of a lifetime of horrid sexual abuse at the hands of their parents. The outrageous defense guaranteed the trial would generate a huge amount of interest. It was further fueled by a television camera the judge allowed in the courtroom. Almost the entire proceeding was shown live on Court TV.

  The trial became a modern-day, real-time soap opera. The prosecution called it a cold-blooded and calculated murder by two spoiled kids who were worried they’d been cut out of their parents’ wills. The defense painted Kitty and Jose as violent sexual abusers of their own children. To try to gain sympathy from the jury, the defense attorneys went to great lengths to make Lyle and Erik appear childlike in the courtroom. The brothers were advised to wear sweaters during the trial rather than the suits and ties they had worn at earlier hearings. The defense continually referred to the two men as “boys,” and at one point, the judge called Abramson to the bench and admonished her for how touchy-feely she was behaving toward her client in front of the jury. He warned the attorneys to stop acting like “nursemaids or surrogate mothers.” Of course, at the time of the murders, both brothers had been adults; Erik had been twenty-one, Lyle eighteen. As the trial dragged on, the brothers took the stand. Their testimony took weeks as they described incredibly deviant sex acts they claimed were perpetrated upon them by their parents.

  As expected, the statements the brothers had made to the therapist became central to the prosecution’s case. The jury heard Lyle talk about their decision to kill Jose: it “was just a question of Erik and I getting together, and somebody bringing it up, and us just realizing the value in it.” Erik was heard saying they had killed their mother because she could never “live without my father.” Strangely absent from the tapes were any complaints of sexual abuse.

  After closing arguments, the two juries went to deliberate. Erik’s jury returned after sixteen days of deliberating and said it was hopelessly deadlocked. Lyle’s jury made the same announcement after twenty-four days. The judge thanked the jury members for their service and released them. The district attorney announced that the brothers would be retried. This time the judge said that the two separate juries would not be needed; one jury would decide the fate of both defendants. By now, the Menendez estate was broke and the brothers were declared indigent by the court. Abramson was paid by the state of California to continue representing Erik, but she would not be getting such a hefty paycheck this time around. Lyle was appointed counsel through the public defender’s office. And this time, perhaps wondering it if might help speed the trail along, Judge Weissberg decided there would be no television cameras in the courtroom. This trial lasted almost half a year. Erik testified for fifteen days. The defense was essentially the same. The brothers claimed they blasted their parents to death with shotguns because they felt that somewhere down the road, Kitty and Jose were going to kill them.

  The jury must have been exhausted by the time the trial came to an end. The prosecutor’s closing argument lasted three and a half days. The defense attorneys weren’t quick either. This time, the jury found the brothers guilty on all charges and also found that special circumstances existed, which meant the brothers would get life in prison with no parole or the death penalty. After a lengthy penalty-phase hearing, the jury opted to not have the brothers executed. It was 1996, almost seven years after they had killed their parents, when they finally went to prison.

  The Menendez brothers fought the convictions. After exhausting their appeals in the California state court system, they turned to the federal courts. There, they argued that they were denied a fair trial because the trial court hadn’t let them put in more evidence of how scared they were of their parents. In other words, if the Menendez brothers got another trial, it would be longer than the previous two. They also thought it was unfair that the jury got to hear the tapes made by the therapist. The federal courts didn’t agree with their take on the law. In 2005, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals denied their request to be freed.

  Wh
at little was left of the estate of Kitty and Jose Menendez was finally liquidated and the home where Kitty and Jose had been killed was sold before the sons were finally convicted.

  The house where the Menendez brothers killed their parents is located at 722 North Elm Drive in Beverly Hills, California. It is Mediterranean in style, the roof is red tile, and it was built in 1927. In 1974, it had been remodeled and updated. It sits on a half-acre lot and is a little over nine thousand square feet, with six bedrooms and eight baths. It sold in 2001 for $3,743,000 and is privately owned today.

  A swimming pool and a guesthouse are behind the house. It is possible that the guesthouse played a role in the murders. In his Vanity Fair article, Dunne noted that he believed it was likely that the killers had gone to the guesthouse and showered before leaving the premises. The guesthouse is two stories tall and even has its own two-car garage. Behind the property was an alley. A person could drive a car from the alley into the guesthouse garage without neighbors on Elm seeing the car coming or going.

  *“Jury Recommends Life without Parole,” The (Youngstown, OH) Vindicator, April 18, 1996.

  *Dominick Dunne, “The Menendez Murder Trial,” Vanity Fair, October 1993.

  The Suburban Serial Killer

  JOEL RIFKIN

  1993

  1492 Garden Street

  East Meadow, New York 11554

  In March 1989, thirty-year-old Joel David Rifkin was left home alone when his mother went on a trip out of town. He celebrated his freedom by hiring a prostitute in the East Village and bringing her to the house he shared with his mother in East Meadow, about a half hour east of Manhattan. After they engaged in sex, he bludgeoned and strangled her to death. He dragged her body into the basement, where he dismembered her with an X-Acto knife, chopped off her head, and placed it in a paint can. He cut off her fingertips and pulled out her teeth, hoping to make her remains impossible to identify. He then drove around, scattering her body parts in a variety of places. Despite his careful efforts, someone stumbled upon the head in the can within a few days and the story hit the papers. As he had hoped, the police could not identify her, but Rifkin was spooked. He didn’t kill again for a year. But then he couldn’t help himself. It would be four gruesome years before the police caught him, and by that time he would have killed quite a few more times.