financial gain, in the manner Kitty and Jose Menendez were killed? To blast holes into one’s parents? To deface them? To obliterate them? In the fatal,
coup de grâce
shot, the barrel of one shotgun touched the cheek of Kitty Menendez. You wonder if her eyes met the eyes of her killer in the last second of her life. In this case, we have two children who allegedly participated in the killing of each parent, not in the heat of rage but in a carefully orchestrated scenario after a long gestation period. There is more than money involved here.There is a deep, deep hatred, a hatred that goes beyond hate.
The closest friend of the Menendez brothers, with whom I talked at length on the condition of anonymity, kept saying to me over and over, “It’s only the tip of the iceberg.” No amount of persuasion on my part could make him explain what the iceberg was. Months earlier, however, a person close to the situation mouthed but did not speak the word “incest” to me. Subsequently, a rich woman in Los Angeles told me that her bodyguard, a former cop, had heard from a friend of his on the Beverly Hills police force that Kitty Menendez had been shot in the vagina. At a Malibu barbecue, a film star said to me, “I heard the mother was shot up the wazoo.” There is, however, no indication of such a penetration in the autopsy report, which carefully delineates each of the ten wounds from the nine shots fired into Kitty Menendez’s body. But the subject continues to surface. Could it be possible that these boys were puppets of their father’s dark side? “They had sexual hatred for their parents,” one of the friends told me. This same person went on to say, “The tapes will show that Jose molested Lyle at a very young age.”
Is this true? Only the boys know. If it is, it could be the defense argument that will return them to their tennis court, swimming pool, and chess set, as inheritors of a $14 million estate that they could not have inherited if they had been found guilty. Karen Lamm, however, does not believe such a story, although it is unlikely that Kitty would have revealed to her a secret of that dimension. Judalon Smyth was also skeptical of this information when I brought up the subject of sexual abuse. She said she had heard nothing of the kind on Halloween afternoon when, according to the California Court of Appeals decision, she listened outside Dr. Oziel’s office door as Lyle and Eriktalked about the murders. She said that last December, almost two months after the October 31 confession to Oziel, which was not taped, the boys, feeling that the police were beginning to suspect them, voluntarily made a tape in which they confessed to the crime. In it, they spoke of their remorse. In it, apparently, they told of psychological abuse. But sexual abuse? Judalon Smyth did not hear this tape, and by that time Dr. Oziel was no longer confiding in her.
October 1990
Q UEENS OF THE R OAD
J ust when you thought you knew all there was to know about the highly publicized Collins sisters, Joan and Jackie, or Jackie and Joan, comes the news that big sister Joan, the soap-opera superstar, whose divorces and romantic exploits have been making tabloid headlines for thirty years, has turned literary in her fifty-fifth year and is moving in on the printed-page turf of her little sister Jackie, the superstar novelist, whose eleven-volume
oeuvre
has sold 65 million copies in thirty languages throughout the world over the last two decades. Yes, friends, Joan Collins, between takes as the beloved bitch Alexis Carrington Colby on “Dynasty,” has written her
own
novel, called
Prime Time
, about a top-rated soap opera on American television, with eight or ten characters, all of them actors and actresses, and a leading lady who has overcome obstacles, both personal and financial, to regain her stardom.
And as if that weren’t enough, Joan’s literary agent, the legendary Irving “Swifty” Lazar, a superstar in his own right,
coup de grâce
shot, the barrel of one shotgun touched the cheek of Kitty Menendez. You wonder if her eyes met the eyes of her killer in the last second of her life. In this case, we have two children who allegedly participated in the killing of each parent, not in the heat of rage but in a carefully orchestrated scenario after a long gestation period. There is more than money involved here.There is a deep, deep hatred, a hatred that goes beyond hate.
The closest friend of the Menendez brothers, with whom I talked at length on the condition of anonymity, kept saying to me over and over, “It’s only the tip of the iceberg.” No amount of persuasion on my part could make him explain what the iceberg was. Months earlier, however, a person close to the situation mouthed but did not speak the word “incest” to me. Subsequently, a rich woman in Los Angeles told me that her bodyguard, a former cop, had heard from a friend of his on the Beverly Hills police force that Kitty Menendez had been shot in the vagina. At a Malibu barbecue, a film star said to me, “I heard the mother was shot up the wazoo.” There is, however, no indication of such a penetration in the autopsy report, which carefully delineates each of the ten wounds from the nine shots fired into Kitty Menendez’s body. But the subject continues to surface. Could it be possible that these boys were puppets of their father’s dark side? “They had sexual hatred for their parents,” one of the friends told me. This same person went on to say, “The tapes will show that Jose molested Lyle at a very young age.”
Is this true? Only the boys know. If it is, it could be the defense argument that will return them to their tennis court, swimming pool, and chess set, as inheritors of a $14 million estate that they could not have inherited if they had been found guilty. Karen Lamm, however, does not believe such a story, although it is unlikely that Kitty would have revealed to her a secret of that dimension. Judalon Smyth was also skeptical of this information when I brought up the subject of sexual abuse. She said she had heard nothing of the kind on Halloween afternoon when, according to the California Court of Appeals decision, she listened outside Dr. Oziel’s office door as Lyle and Eriktalked about the murders. She said that last December, almost two months after the October 31 confession to Oziel, which was not taped, the boys, feeling that the police were beginning to suspect them, voluntarily made a tape in which they confessed to the crime. In it, they spoke of their remorse. In it, apparently, they told of psychological abuse. But sexual abuse? Judalon Smyth did not hear this tape, and by that time Dr. Oziel was no longer confiding in her.
October 1990
Q UEENS OF THE R OAD
J ust when you thought you knew all there was to know about the highly publicized Collins sisters, Joan and Jackie, or Jackie and Joan, comes the news that big sister Joan, the soap-opera superstar, whose divorces and romantic exploits have been making tabloid headlines for thirty years, has turned literary in her fifty-fifth year and is moving in on the printed-page turf of her little sister Jackie, the superstar novelist, whose eleven-volume
oeuvre
has sold 65 million copies in thirty languages throughout the world over the last two decades. Yes, friends, Joan Collins, between takes as the beloved bitch Alexis Carrington Colby on “Dynasty,” has written her
own
novel, called
Prime Time
, about a top-rated soap opera on American television, with eight or ten characters, all of them actors and actresses, and a leading lady who has overcome obstacles, both personal and financial, to regain her stardom.
And as if that weren’t enough, Joan’s literary agent, the legendary Irving “Swifty” Lazar, a superstar in his own right,
Similar Books
