As Ryan Murphy’s Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story recalls in its controversial, true-crime-camp glory, the tale of Beverly Hills brothers Lyle and Erik brutally murdering their parents, José and Mary Louise “Kitty” Menendez, in 1989 was an American horror story. It had all the elements to transfix a nation—spoiled, attractive Beverly Hills brothers who made some seriously bone-headed decisions (one wrote a screenplay about a character who kills his parents; both spent up to a combined $700,000 in the aftermath of their parents’ deaths) and allegations of sexual abuse in the country’s most elite zip code. While those pulpy issues were at the forefront of the boys’ 1993 trial, the court case also featured two witnesses whose behavior was perhaps just as confounding (though not criminal): Menendez therapist L. Jerome Oziel and his mistress, Judalon Smyth. Eventually, these two managed to temporarily steal the courtroom spotlight from Lyle and Erik. In fact, their testimony became such a circus sideshow that neither was invited back to testify during the brothers’ second trial.
Dominick Dunne, who covered the trial for this magazine, credited Erik’s lead defense counsel Leslie Abramson for taking “what was virtually an open-and-shut case of premeditated murder in the first degree,” complete with confession from the killers, and shapeshifting it before the public’s very eyes. Oziel was the source of the case’s smoking-gun evidence: tapes of the brothers’ therapy sessions, during which they described plotting their parents’ murders (“the perfect crime,” they called it, as Oziel remembered). Abramson fought for the tapes to be excluded from trial. When she lost that battle, she announced that she would discredit the psychologist in “every way known to man and God.”
During the trial, Abramson worked Oziel like a chew toy. She got him to admit he hadn’t told the Menendez family—who hired him after the boys were caught burglarizing two homes—that his license was on probation by the state board of psychology because of what it called an inappropriate “dual relationship”: exchanging therapy for construction work done at his house by a patient. Abramson asked about a 1990 lawsuit Smyth filed against Oziel in Los Angeles Superior Court, alleging that the psychologist assaulted, raped, kidnapped, and medicated her. When Abramson asked whether Oziel settled the case for $400,000 to $500,000, he replied that his insurance company did. (Oziel had also filed a countersuit, alleging that Smyth developed a “bizarre fixation and obsession with him.”)
At the time, the state psychology board was accusing Oziel of engaging in a sexual relationship with another woman who worked in his home as a housekeeper—and said that he improperly gave her medication and assaulted her. (Oziel denied those charges.) It was also revealed during trial that Oziel didn’t turn his Menendez session tapes into authorities. Instead, he put the tapes into a safe deposit box and, according to Smyth, tried to extort money from the brothers by saying that paying him weekly, even if they did not attend sessions, would be good for their defense if they were ever put on trial. By the end of Abramson’s days-long skewering, even she was bored, according to Robert Rand’s book The Menendez Murders. The lawyer told the judge that, during her questioning of Oziel the following day, “I’m going to be briefer than I thought. I’m frankly sort of sick of him.”
Oziel’s testimony was so damaging to his character that, in 1993 the LA Times reported that his cushy existence—he had a 6,000-square-foot canyon home, a psychologist wife, two children, and a waiting list for his $150-per-hour sessions—is “not such a good life anymore…. For Oziel, it is his reputation that is on trial.” He faced state disciplinary hearings due to the revelations in court. In 1997, the Consumer Affairs Board of Psychology charged Oziel with “a variety of offenses,” according to a spokesperson who spoke to CNN, including sharing confidential information about his patients with Smyth; having both a business and sexual relationship with Smyth; supplying her with drugs; physically assaulting her on two occasions; and engaging in sexual misconduct with two female clients. (Oziel’s attorney denied the last charge, claiming the women were not patients.) Rather than go to court, Oziel surrendered his license “while at the same time denying he engaged in any improprieties,” according to his lawyer. “He is not practicing psychology anymore and hasn’t been for several years. It wasn’t worth the expense and interference with his life.”
The defense’s greatest gift, during the first trial, may have been Oziel’s mistress: an attractive woman who first reached out to Oziel in the hopes of getting relationship therapy. After she realized she could not afford Oziel’s sessions, she became sexually involved with the psychologist, and dysfunctionally enmeshed in both his marriage and the Menendez case. After Oziel broke up with her, Smyth told authorities that Oziel possessed taped confessions from the Menendez brothers.