Volume 43, Number 10 · June 6, 1996
Family Values
By Elizabeth Hardwick
In Contempt
by Christopher A. Darden
ReganBooks/HarperCollins, 387 pp., $26.00
Reasonable Doubts: The O.J. Simpson Case and the Criminal Justice System
by Alan M. Dershowitz
Simon and Schuster, 238 pp., $20.00
The Search for Justice: A Defense Attorney's Brief on the O.J. Simpson Case
by Robert L. Shapiro
Warner Books, 363 pp., $24.95
I Want to Tell You
by O.J. Simpson
Little, Brown, 208 pp., $17.95
Lyle and Erik Menendez, two furtive suburban churls, gunned down their parents in August 1989, almost seven years ago. The brothers were not arrested until six months after the murders; during the gap they had quite a good time spending the impressive bank account of their father, Jose Menendez, a corporate executive, self-made, forty-five years old when he and his wife, Kitty, forty-seven years old were killed. Jose and Kitty, the parents, Lyle and Erik, the sons. One needs a bit of caution to keep these now familiar couplings from tripping off the tongue as if they were family skits in the old vaudeville days. The brothers' incarceration came about when recordings of a detailed confession made to a psychiatrist were at last turned over to the police. They were brought to trial, each with his own jury, neither of which could agree on a verdict, and so they went back to prison to await a retrial and to find themselves displaced in public interest by the indictment of the former football star O.J. Simpson for the murder by stabbing of his ex-wife and a hapless friend who happened to be at the scene. In any case, the Menendez brothers and O.J. Simpson, by way of the cameras in the courtroom during the trials, became international double-homicide celebrities.
Review, 5597 words
To read the full text of this piece, please choose one of the following options:
|
If you are already a subscriber to the Review's electronic edition, please sign in: |
To subscribe to the electronic edition, please press the button below. |
To purchase access to this article for $3, please press the button below. |