The Menendez Brothers | Juror #9

It's Monday, June 28, 1993, in the Van Nuys Courthouse, about 16 miles from downtown Los Angeles.

36-year-old Hazel Thornton sits in the wood panel jury waiting room.

Every seat is taken, and there are plenty more people standing around.

Scanning the crowd, Hazel figures that there has to be around a hundred potential jurors.

Around her, Hazel can hear snatches of conversation.

People are comparing notes on their jobs, their children, the traffic on their journeys here.

Some are strategizing ways to get out of serving on the jury.

Hazel can't blame them.

If they're chosen, they'll only be getting $5 a day.

Hazel's lucky, though.

She's a technology planner for a phone company who'll keep paying her salary if she's put on jury.

And they've gotten word that this is going to be a long trial.

Five months, they think, maybe longer, with deliberations.

All of a sudden, the doors at one end of the room swing open, and a court official asks everyone to get up.

There's excited murmuring now.

People have been speculating about what the trial could be.

It's got to be something big, something that'll have been in the news.

Scuttlebutt is that it's the Menendez case, the one where the spoiled rich kids murdered their loving parents in cold blood, all to get their millions?

The would-be jurors follow the court official out of the waiting room and down a long hallway.

Listening to the chatter around her, Hazel can't help but get swept up in the intrigue.

But she's not convinced that they're here for the Menendez case.

That was four years ago.

Surely it was settled before now.

Everyone knows those boys didn't.

Ahead of Hazel, the official opens another door, into the courtroom itself.

Hazel files in alongside the other jurors.

It's more wood paneling here.

Higher ceilings, though.

Hazel and the others are directed to take seats on the benches.

Once everyone's sat down, the judge calls the room to order.

He explains that the defendant will be brought in and that they'll hear the charges against them.

After that, jury selection will begin.

A door at the side of the courtroom opens and an armed guard appears, escorting a tall young man in a light-colored sweater.

The defendant is thin, with broad shoulders and dark curls.

He's pale, like he hasn't seen much sun recently.

From her seat in the gallery, Hazel recognizes him at once.

It's Erik Menendez.

Just looking at him makes her blood run cold.

He killed his parents.

Hazel watches as Erik reaches his legal team at their desk.

He leans over to hear something his lawyer's saying.

Hazel wonders what on earth they could be planning to say to explain such an awful crime.

But she thinks if she gets chosen today, then she'll have five months to find out.

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By the summer of 1993, the murder trial of Lyle and Erik Menendez was finally ready to begin.

The brothers stood accused of killing their parents.

Jose and Kitty Menendez were found dead in the living room of their Los Angeles mansion on the night of August 20th, 1989.

At first, Lyle and Erik had seemed to evade suspicion, but when one of them confessed to his therapist that they were the ones who wielded the shotguns, then the brothers' deceptions began to unravel.

Just over six months after the murders, the Menendez brothers were arrested.

It was another three years, however, before the case came to trial.

But when the day finally did come, it wasn't just journalists, lawyers and Menendez family members who crowded into the courtroom in Van Nuys.

Also perched strategically around the room were television cameras.

The entire trial was to be broadcast from gavel to gavel.

Four years after the shocking murders, the American people still couldn't get enough of the Menendez story.

And now it seemed the gripping final chapter was about to begin.

But out of the thousands tuning in to watch that first day, few paid much attention to the men and women who would actually decide the fate of the young Menendez brothers.

The two panels of jurors sat quietly off to the side, nervously anticipating the opening remarks.

For those 24 people, it wasn't just a juicy scandal anymore.

They knew they'd been handed an awesome responsibility.

The weight of their verdict would have life and death consequences, and it would stick with them for years to come.

Here to discuss her experience as one of those jurors is Hazel Thornton, an author and genealogist.

Our conversation is next.

Hazel, thank you so much for joining me today.

Thank you so much for having me.

Oh, you're so welcome.

Let's get right to it.

So, your book, Hung Jury, is actually the diary that you kept during the trial, which was seven months long.

What made you decide to do that?

Well, the judge told us that we weren't allowed to speak to anyone about the case, and it was going to be such a long case, it was very stressful to think that I had to eventually make such a momentous decision.

I had to talk to somebody, so I talked to my diary as a way of coping with the stress of the trial.

I had no intentions of publishing it until I was approached afterwards by a psychology professor who studies juries.

So, it really was just to keep everything straight for your own peace of mind and walking into that courtroom every day prepared.

And to unload my brain of what I had been through.

Oh, I can imagine.

You have a very impressive background in engineering.

You were a professional organizer for many years.

How do you think those analytical skills help serve you during the trial?

I think they served me well.

I don't know that I had as much influence on the jury as I hoped.

But also, I didn't become a professional organizer until several years later.

I wish I had already been one though, because I later created a bunch of what I call clutter flow charts.

I eventually created a Menendez flow chart called What's Your Verdict, which you can find on my website.

Yes, I have actually been to your website.

I've done my due diligence, orgforlife.com.

I've checked it out and it is fascinating.

I mean, you've really done the work.

Thanks.

I think it would have been very helpful during deliberations.

I think it would have been incredibly helpful during deliberations.

I think you're absolutely correct about that.

So at the time of their arrest, the DA was using the media like crazy to kind of color the narrative of the case.

What did you know about the Menendez story before you ended up on the jury?

All I knew was basically from People Magazine.

And all anyone knew is that they were greedy rich kids who killed their parents for money.

That was the story going around, and People Magazine certainly was the major source of news of the day, it would seem.

You wrote that when you first saw Erik walk into the courtroom that your blood ran cold.

Why do you think that was?

Well, it was because I had never seen a killer in person before.

And for all I knew from the media coverage, he and Lyle were both evil.

So when did you start to have doubts about the story that you had heard from the media and the DA?

I started to have doubts just as soon as Leslie Abramson gave her opening statements.

I had agreed to keep an open mind and was intrigued by the possibility that her version of events could be true.

I think one of the main jobs of the defense was to humanize both brothers, and I think they did an excellent job of it.

So by the time the brothers' case first came to trial in 1993, their team made it clear that they were going to use the abuse that Kitty and Jose allegedly subjected Lyle and Erik to as a defense for the shootings.

Had you heard about this by the time that you were impaneled on the jury?

There were items on our jury questionnaire that hinted at abuse, but otherwise I had not heard anything, no.

I didn't even realize their level of guilt was still in question.

It was four years later that I reported for jury duty.

Gosh, I can't imagine what sitting around waiting for that phone call must have been like.

Surprise, you're on the biggest trial possibly of the century all of a sudden.

It wasn't something I was waiting for.

It was a surprise, all right, though.

Yeah, I can imagine.

So the first Menendez trial that lasted for months, it included over a hundred witnesses.

Who were the most compelling witnesses in your opinion?

I always say that there were three categories of witnesses that I found most compelling.

The first one was Lyle and Erik themselves, then their family members, in particular, their cousins and aunts who supported them wholeheartedly to this day, and also the psychological expert witnesses whose testimony the prosecution dismissed as psychobabble.

They did not even present experts of their own to refute it.

Speaking of that, what were your thoughts on Dr.

Ozeal?

That laugh was a pretty good answer right there.

The prosecution's star witness was Dr.

Ozeal, and he was so thoroughly discredited by the defense that the prosecution did not even use him in the second trial at all.

From a practical standpoint as a juror, how easy is it to disregard evidence that a judge tells you to disregard?

Someone says, don't think about an elephant, and the first thing you think about is an elephant.

So how do you go about doing that?

How do you erase that from your mind?

You don't.

You can't.

I remember thinking, you can't unring a bell.

And there were a couple of times where he said that, and the evidence wasn't the subject of discussion.

But the biggest piece of non-evidence was Lester Kuriyama's assertion in closing arguments that Erik was gay, and that that was the cause of the problems in the family.

I only mention it because it became the biggest topic of discussion in our deliberations.

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So you wrote that the judge reminded you every day, don't talk about the case, don't talk about it to anyone, don't read about it, don't watch TV.

So once the mistrial was declared, did you go back and revisit any of the coverage, any of the press, any of that?

I had a friend who was clipping articles for me, and I still have them, but I never read them all.

It was impossible to avoid all news of the trial, and I already knew it was biased in favor of the prosecution.

There was one day in particular, though, late in the trial when Leslie Abramson had successfully impeached several prosecution witnesses in a row.

I later checked that day's coverage, thinking it was at least possible for the headline to be something like, Abramson catches five witnesses lying, but no, instead it was, Cool Repairman Disputes Claimed by Menendezes.

So that kind of discourages me from wanting to read more.

I can imagine.

Again, just the burnout of having been there every day and having been so intimately involved in hearing the gory, gory details that the public didn't get to be a part of.

Yeah, it was kind of a whole big long phase of, well, I was there and you weren't.

So what was it like to relive the trial from an outsider's perspective?

It was very frustrating when Ellen Abramson of the Los Angeles Times wrote that we women had voted for voluntary manslaughter because we were, quote, so enamored with Abramson and her argument, unquote.

I wrote a letter to the editor and I'm going to quote myself now.

I said, doesn't anyone in this town understand the concepts of reasonable doubt and burden of proof?

If this is the kind of reporting your readers have been relying on these past six months, I doubt there is an unbiased potential juror left in the whole state.

Ooh, my goodness.

I heard a whip crack just then, I think.

That's interesting because that leads me to my next question, which is the introduction of your book.

You tell a story that involves a radio host who liked to focus on ethics and morality on his show.

And when he suggested that the male-female split in your jury came down to the men were more focused on justice and the women were more driven by compassion, you felt compelled to call in, but he did not want to hear from an actual Menendez juror, or possibly a female Menendez juror.

Yeah, that was Dennis Prager.

He actually said it would be interesting to talk to a woman from Erik's jury.

That's why I called.

It was really early on, and I didn't really have an agenda yet.

But you know who was equally infuriating?

Alan Dershowitz.

He coined the term, the abuse excuse, and wrote a book about it.

Both of these men were speaking from a place of authority and it influenced a lot of people, and they were both wrong, in my opinion.

Now, early on in the case, there was another radio host that called the women who sympathize with the brothers, bimbo sluts, and then, when the gender split in Erik's jury was revealed in the media, a lot of pundits took to calling the women on the jury Lesley's girls.

They were referring to Erik's attorney, Lesley Abramson, as someone who lived inside much of this.

Hazel, how did that affect you?

Yeah, that was Ken and John on KFI.

All of the criticism made me very wary of talking to the press, and I now see it as another form of abuse.

No wonder people don't want to participate in jury duty.

I didn't talk about the case for 20 years, between the time my first initial very small printing of the book sold out and later when it was republished.

How did it make you feel about the way the media puts itself into active criminal proceedings?

I think it's unfair to defendants and prejudicial to future juries, and I do think it makes them not want to participate.

That's the most interesting part to me, is that we allow this influence constantly.

It's been going on for so long that we don't notice it anymore.

We're just kind of like living with chronic pain.

So you had a front row seat to the first trial.

How closely, if at all, did you follow the second trial when it came around?

And if you did, what are your thoughts on how it was handled?

I followed the second trial as closely as I possibly could.

I had predicted that everything being equal, there would be another hung jury.

But everything was far from equal.

I included a list of nine differences in my book.

Sometimes people disparage the second trial jury for convicting them of murder, but I don't blame them a bit.

They saw a completely different trial than I did and really had no choice.

You mentioned nine differences in your book.

Can you expand on those and why you think the trials were so unequal?

I wrote an essay at the time, which I included in the reprint of my book 20 years later, that outlined nine differences.

I call the first one, Hindsight is 2020.

In the first trial, the prosecution completely underestimated the defense and lost what had been considered a slam dunk case.

The second time around, the prosecution was even better prepared and had an unfair advantage.

Secondly, in the first trial, there were two juries, one for each brother.

In the second trial, there was only one jury, making it easier to downplay the fact that they were individual human beings.

Third, the abuse excuse.

This is a phrase coined by Alan Dershowitz that helped prejudice the whole world against anything the Menendez Brothers had to say.

I believe it contributed towards enabling Judge Weisberg to rule out the imperfect self-defense theory and to eliminate most of the evidence of abuse in the second trial.

The fourth one I call, Ozeal Who?

Dr.

Ozeal was the prosecution's star witness in the first trial, but he was so thoroughly discredited by the defense that they didn't use him at all in the second trial.

Number five is the smoking gun.

This is how prosecutor David Kahn referred to the so-called confession tape.

Granted, the brothers say some pretty incriminating things on that tape.

However, imagine being presented this evidence by the defense, like we were, after months of testimony about the Menendez family's dysfunction and Ozeal's lack of ethics.

Then imagine instead in the second trial, the same evidence presented by the prosecution at the outset of the trial without any context whatsoever.

Number six, one brother versus two.

Erik was the only brother to testify in the second trial for several reasons.

I think there's no way his testimony was as compelling as it was the first time around and without his brother's testimony to strengthen it.

Seven, the first trial was a media circus.

However, during the second trial, no television cameras were allowed in the courtroom.

Many people didn't even realize the trial was underway.

Eight, pressure to convict.

A whole string of high-profile prosecution losses set the stage for the second Menendez trial.

These included the McMartin Preschool Molestation Trial, the Rodney King and Reginald Denny trials, the first Menendez trial and the OJ.

Simpson Double Murder Trial.

All of these trials involved either Judge Weisberg, DA.

Garcetti or both.

And I think they engineered the second trial to guarantee murder convictions.

The ninth difference I call life or death.

This refers to the fact that all 54 of the Menendez jurors, including the alternates, were what they called death qualified.

This means we were all willing under some extreme circumstance or other to sentence someone to death.

In the end, the second trial jurors demonstrated compassion by refusing to sentence the brothers to death.

That's because they were presented some evidence of abuse during the penalty phase of the trial that had been withheld during the guilt phase.

One of the second trial jurors said it best, in normal families, people don't kill each other.

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In 93, when the jury selection was still going on for that first trial, you wrote that you respected judge Stanley Weisberg, who would preside over both of the trials, both of the Menendez trials.

Did your opinion of him change at all over the course of the trials?

My opinion changed day and night.

My opinion started to change as soon as the defense began their case.

I noticed a change in his demeanor and wondered why.

I wrote it off at first as being annoyed with Leslie Abramson.

But over time, I wondered if he wasn't prosecution biased.

My opinion of Judge Weisberg fell completely during the second trial when he started changing his rulings and restricting the defense's witness list and the evidence about abuse.

So a follow up to that, what in your opinion makes one a qualified juror or jurist and a good one, not just qualified, but good at it?

Well, I think all a juror has to do is keep an open mind and follow the instructions.

You know, you can't study for it.

Right.

But what makes a good judge, I mean, I just don't see the point in a judge and a DA getting together and saying we need a win and essentially engineering the second trial to guarantee a murder verdict.

It seems to me like whatever the evidence shows should be the result, not, oh, we lost because it came out differently than we expected.

Right.

I mean, it's hard not to argue that society's attitudes towards survivors of childhood sexual abuse and intimate partner violence have evolved in the past three decades since this trial.

In light of that, do you think that you and the other jurors who voted for manslaughter, might you be more inclined to outright acquit the brothers today, or would you stick with your manslaughter?

I don't think there would be an acquittal, but I do think that it's more likely the ones who voted for murder would vote for manslaughter today.

The defense theory in the first trial, which was unfairly disallowed in the second trial, was called imperfect self-defense.

That's the honest belief, true or not, that your life is in imminent danger.

And the verdict for that is still manslaughter, not murder, but not acquittal either.

So that law would have to change for there to be a unanimous verdict of manslaughter.

And acquittal, I mean, there's such a thing as a jury nullification, but I don't know how often that happens.

Other laws have changed though, along with the evolution of society and our understanding of how abuse affects children's brains growing up.

Many other people who have committed crimes when they were under the age of 25, with the evidence of abuse, have had their cases reviewed and been released with time served.

The only reason the Menendez Brothers don't fall into that category too, is that they were sentenced to life without possibility of parole.

And there's no legal possibility that that can be reversed or readdressed.

I mean, somebody could change the law tomorrow and it could be addressed.

They did file a writ of habeas corpus this year, well, last year now, in May.

And their case is being looked at for a possible vacation of the, I don't know the legal term for what might happen with them.

Hopefully, please God, not a new trial.

But the current laws have changed, essentially for everybody but the Menendez Brothers.

Which is so interesting, because in recent years, there has been this renewed interest in the Menendez case.

This year marks 35 years since they murdered their parents.

Why do you think we keep returning to this particular story?

It's a story that never ends, isn't it?

I think people who were alive and paying attention back in the 90s, but who relied on the prosecution biased media for their information, wonder why it keeps coming up and they resent it.

Some of them get really nasty about it.

But the new generations, the kids, they wonder what the heck?

How can the brothers still be in prison after all these years?

They're actually watching the first trial on Court TV.

Court TV released the recordings in 2020, and anybody can watch the entire thing if they want to, like I did.

They're seeing what I saw and they're sympathizing with the brothers.

So as long as it seems like an unresolved situation, I think we'll still be talking about them.

And hopefully soon a decision will be made and they'll be released from prison.

If they had been convicted of manslaughter, they would have only served 22 years maximum, and it's been 30 some years.

If you wanted to, it wouldn't be that big of a stretch to add on the years of abuse that they went through.

Yeah, what's interesting is that even early on, they said their lives are better in prison than they were at home.

Gosh, how bad does it have to be for someone to say that?

After the mistrial, now you spoke with groups of lawyers and law students, all kinds of places, including Yale, Princeton.

What did you talk about?

I just told them what the experience was like for me and answered questions.

They were friendly groups who believed the brothers and understood the law and why I had voted for manslaughter.

And I'm curious because the students who were students at that time, they're lawyers now for all intents and purposes.

What did they ask the most?

What were they most focused on at that time?

At the time, everybody was mostly interested in the gender split.

So I talked a lot about how the women were perceived as being emotional and the men as so logical when, in fact, it had been the other way around, in my opinion.

And it's only lately that people are interested in what effect the media had on us.

At the time, it was mostly the gender split.

Right.

Do you have any advice for listeners who find themselves jurors on a high profile case?

Yes.

Well, I encourage everyone to participate in jury duty and to not try to get out of it.

It's a civic duty, but it's also highly educational.

And it's also fun in some ways if you let it be.

But beware of the media afterwards if it's a high profile case and you find yourself in the position of being a dissenting vote on a hung jury or the whole jury reached an unpopular decision.

That's great advice.

Hazel Thornton, thank you so much for speaking with me today on American Criminal.

I really appreciate it.

Thank you so much for having me.

That was my conversation with author and genealogist Hazel Thornton.

Her book about the Menendez trial is called Hung Jury, Diary of a Menendez Juror.

From Airship, this is the final episode in our series on the Menendez Brothers.

On the next season of American Criminal, a first generation American from Brooklyn finds himself drawn into New York's violent street gangs.

But when he crosses the wrong man, young Al Capone has to flee his hometown and make for Chicago.

Just in time for Prohibition.

If you'd like to learn more about the Menendez Brothers, we recommend Hung Jury, The Diary of a Menendez Juror, by Hazel Thornton.

This episode may contain reenactments or dramatized details, and while in some cases we can't know exactly what happened, all our dramatizations are based on historical research.

American Criminal is hosted, edited, and produced by me, Jeremy Schwartz.

Audio Editing by Mohammed Shazid.

Sound Design by Matthew Filler.

Music by Thrum.

This episode is written and researched by Joel Callan.

Managing Producer, Emily Burke.

Executive Producers are Joel Callan, William Simpson and Lindsay Graham for Airship.

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