Menendez Brothers' Juror Speaks Out, What you didn't see at the trial | COURT TV

[Music] i'm vinnie politan thanks so much for joining us tonight we'll get to a lot of these stories coming up in just a little bit but first we're going to do a little bit of time travel tonight in the core tv time machine as we go back to probably the first huge i mean huge trial here on court tv it happened before o.j simpson and it was the menendez brothers trial if you don't remember it maybe you're young or it's just been a while take a look beverly hills police dispatcher christina nye received a 911

station on the line was lyle menendez who sounded hysterical reporting that quote someone shot my mom and my dad sergeant edmonds asked lyle menendez if he had any idea as to who would have done this crime lal menendez opined that his father would probably be the reason for the murders you didn't have a guilty conscience at that point about having bought these guns and about having bought the more powerful ammunition knowing that you intended to use it on your parents and riding with them to this fishing trip you had no guilty conscience about that guilty

conscience yes i thought they were going to kill us on the fishing trip i wasn't guilty about getting two shotguns no you knew you wanted to kill your parents isn't that right i wanted to shoot at them yes you wanted what i wanted to shoot at them but mr menendez you had to reload the shotgun in order to put that round into your mother's cheek didn't you right and you had to go someplace to get ammunition so that you could reload the shotgun to put that round into her cheek i actually didn't have to but

i did what eric and i did beyond strength the prosecution has suggested to you that it was done for money it was done to commit the perfect crime and what we will prove to you is it was done out of fear an event began which set all of this in motion eric menendez told his brother lyle menendez that he couldn't stand it any longer his father had been molesting him for 12 years it had gotten more violent and he couldn't take it although shocked to hear that this had been going on for the 12 years

he believed eric between the ages of six and eight did your father have sexual contact with you yes we would be in the bathroom and it would he would put me on my knees and he would guide me all my movements and i would have oral sex with him he'd have a tube of vaseline and he just played with me did he try to anally penetrate you with something else he did and what was it it he break me what did you expect i was going to go to college how significant a notion was it

was the most important thing in my life it was everything in my life it was all i thought about why was it all you thought about why was it all i thought about yeah because it would end the sex and that's all i thought about it how did you feel at 18 about the fact that your father was having sex with you i hated it i hated it the defense is going to tell you that what happened is these defendants were in a constant and heightened state of fear between the 15th of august and the

20th of august but the evidence in this case not the defendant's words but the physical circumstantial evidence in this case disproves the defense theory the court finds that the jury is hopelessly deadlocked and declares a mistrial i find that the jury is hopelessly deadlocked and the court declares a mistrial at the end there you heard the judge say it twice that's because in that first trial where there were cameras there were two juries one for each defendant and they both ended up being hung juries let's bring in our guests because we have two really good

guests tonight special guests first one of the jurors from the mendez brothers first trial hazel thornton is with us hazel is also the author of the book hung jury the diary of a menendez juror and also joining us by phone tonight journalist robert rand robert is the author of the menendez brothers the shocking untold story of menendez family and the killings that stunned the nation and he has been covering this story longer and in more depth than anyone great to have you both here um hazel let me go to you first um your jury did

not come to a unanimous agreement but what was your personal verdict during that first trial oh my personal verdict was um that first of all i was on the eric menendez jury and my personal verdict was that he was guilty of involuntary no voluntary manslaughter not guilty and so the jury was wrong just if you can kind of understand was it was it split along male and female um how how did this break down because i've heard a lot of stories it was a battle of the sexes it was it was on our jury it

was split half and half six women and six men all of the women wanted to vote for manslaughter and all of the men wanted to work vote for murder on the lyle menendez jury it was slightly different but roughly half and half roughly men against women unbelievable robert rand let me ask you because you know this story uh and these trials better than anyone what is what is the biggest misperception that people have these days about this case the biggest misperception that people have is that eric and lyle menendez were a pair of greedy rich

kids who killed their parents because they were in a hurry to inherit their money and that is absolutely not true this was a case of intergenerational sex abuse mental illness there were so many different factors it's hard for me to even keep it all straight but one of the most important factoids you need to know is that in the summer of 92 a year before the brothers went on trial the l.a county da's office went to a grand jury and asked them to return an indictment of murder for financial gain the grand jury did not

return that indictment and yet the prosecutors prosecuting the menendez case van busan and schwester kuryama they kept beating that into the uh trial put you know pulling that into the trial and i think they just wanted the general public to hate the brothers which actually is what ended up happening have you been in contact with with them through the years i have stayed in contact with lyle menendez uh actually i have been visiting lyle menendez uh about every six to eight weeks and i had an opportunity to visit with him the last week in february

just before covert shut down all the visiting in california prisons oh yeah we have a picture right there and um where are things for them right now is you know we always hear that everyone's got you know a new issue a new appeal coming i mean it's been many many years is there any sort of legal recourse that they are pursuing still at this point i remain hopeful that eric and lyle menendez are going to file for a new appeal in california which i think will be a really big deal uh as i said this

their their conviction was a miscarriage of justice the resolution of this case should have been uh manslaughter not murder they still would have served 22 years on a manslaughter charge and um on december 27th eric menendez actually uh uh made a comment during an online chat uh on his uh youtube channel justice watchdog and he said uh that the brothers are planning to file a new appeal in 2021 all right so hazel and you agree with what uh robert is saying manslaughter why did you believe this was manslaughter i mean it seemed like they planned

this a little bit they covered it up they active with some level of malice how did you come to a conclusion that you believed it was manslaughter well it actually none of that what you just said was actually proven by the prosecution and it was their burden of defense what the the biggest um debate well it wasn't the number one topic of discussion but the uh men all kept saying that the defense had not proven sexual abuse and the women kept saying it's not up to the defense to prove anything it's up to the prosecution

to prove the elements of murder and they have not done that they they underestimated the jury i believe and were unprepared for the defense right and and what did you think of their of of what they testified to about the alleged sex abuse did you believe it did the um other women who were voting for manslaughter also believe it we believed them but it wasn't just about the sexual abuse i mean there are other other forms of abuse testified to such as um you know physical that wasn't sexual mental emotional um all sorts of neglect

and it was not just testified to by the brothers it was also by a parade of teachers and coaches and neighbors and friends and relatives so it wasn't just them saying it and it wasn't just about sex robert rand let me ask you about um you mentioned that they're looking for another appeal a lot of times when it's been this many years you need maybe something like some new evidence something that has been uncovered recently that wasn't available at the time of the trial has anything like that come up for the menendez brothers yes the

threshold for reopening an appeal in california is that you have to have uh some new evidence and um i uncovered a letter shortly before the deadline for my 2018 book the monetary murders which was a letter that eric menendez wrote to his cousin andy cano in which he was complaining about the molestation and in this letter uh he is also talking about how spaced out his mother was and how concerned he was about her and that letter was from december of 1988 and i think that will be a potential important new piece of evidence but

i have also been going back through hundreds of audio tape interviews that i did going back to 1989 when i interviewed the brothers for the miami herald uh two months after the killings of jose and kitty five months before they were arrested they weren't suspects publicly i had no reason to be suspicious of them and in those tapes that i'm going through i am finding information about people that friends of lyle menendez that knew about the molestation four to five months before the murders and i think that could potentially be an explosive piece of evidence

hazel they killed mom and dad right jose and kitty like with the sex abuse and all of that and and and the allegations of you know we feared for our lives or we thought they were gonna kill us or hurt us like i understand it for the father um why do you do you think the same was true of why they killed their mom also they were equally afraid of her they their parents were a team and they and they found out that she knew what had been going on so that scared them even more

than they had been and one final question for robert rand why i mean they were eight with were they 18 and 20 years old 18 and 21 at the time why didn't they just kind of like walk away or go to police or or reach out to someone they were they were grown they were adults that's vinnie that is the number one question people ask me they were 18 and 21 why didn't they leave home the answer is the therapy experts who evaluated them told me that their emotional maturity was somewhere around eight to ten

years old jose and kitty menendez had made the brothers very dependent on them they could not imagine walking out the front door of that house robert rand hazel thornton wow great to have you both on the program really giving folks at home some insight into all of this and uh check out their books folks because they lived it you can also go to court tv.com and watch the trial because we have it on demand hazel robert thank you both so much thank you thank you