How the Menendez brothers' therapist and his lover became a circus sideshow of the murder trial

As Robert F. Kennedy'S Monster: The Story of Lyle and Erik Menendez recalls in its controversial splendor the true crime story of the Beverly Hills brothers Lyle And Eric The brutal 1989 murder of their parents, José and Mary Louise “Kitty” Menendez, was an American horror story. It had all the elements to captivate a nation — spoiled, attractive brothers from Beverly Hills who made some truly dumb decisions (one wrote a screenplay about a character who kills his parents; both spent up to $700,000 combined after their parents died) and allegations of sexual abuse in the country's most elite zip code. While these lurid issues were at the forefront of the boys' 1993 trial, the trial also featured two witnesses whose behavior was perhaps just as baffling (if not criminal): Menendez's therapist L. Jerome Oziel and his lover, Judalon Smith. Eventually, these two managed to temporarily steal the show from Lyle and Erik in the courtroom. In fact, their testimony became such a circus-like sideshow that neither of them was invited to testify again at the brothers' second trial.

Dominick Dunne, who covered the trial for this magazine, praised Erik’s lead defense attorney Leslie Abramson for reshaping “a virtually clear-cut case of premeditated first-degree murder” and the killers' confessions in front of the public. Oziel was the source of the case's hard evidence: tapes of the brothers' therapy sessions in which they described how they planned to kill their parents (“the perfect crime,” they called it, Oziel recalled). Abramson fought to have the tapes excluded from the trial. When she lost that fight, she announced that she would discredit the psychologist “in every way possible.”

During the trial, Abramson worked Oziel like a chew toy. She got him to admit that he hadn't told the Menendez family — who hired him after the boys were caught burglarizing two homes — that his license was on probation with the state psychology board because he had an inappropriate “double relationship”: He traded therapy for construction work a patient was doing in his home. Abramson asked about a lawsuit Smyth filed against Oziel in Los Angeles Superior Court in 1990. In the lawsuit, she claimed the psychologist assaulted, raped, kidnapped and drugged her. When Abramson asked if Oziel had settled the case for $400,000 to $500,000, he replied that his insurance company had. (Oziel had also filed a countersuit claiming that Smyth had developed a “bizarre fixation and obsession with him.”)

At the time, the state psychology commission accused Oziel of having a sexual relationship with another woman who worked as a housekeeper in his home—and said he improperly medicated her and assaulted her. (Oziel denied those allegations.) During the trial, it was also revealed that Oziel did not turn over his recordings of the Menendez sessions to authorities. Instead, he put the recordings in a bank safe deposit box and, according to Smyth, tried to extort money from the brothers by saying that a weekly payment, even if they did not attend the sessions, would benefit their defense if they were ever brought to trial. By the end of Abramson's days-long diatribe, even she was bored, according to Robert Rand's book The Menendez murders. The lawyer told the judge during her questioning of Oziel the next day: “I'm going to be briefer than I thought. Frankly, I'm a little tired of him.”

Oziel’s testimony was so damaging to his character that in 1993 the LA Times reported that his comfortable life — he had a 6,000-square-foot house in a ravine, a wife who is a psychologist, two children and a waiting list for his $150-an-hour sessions — “wasn't such a nice life anymore. . . . Oziel's reputation is under scrutiny.” The court revelations led to him facing state disciplinary hearings. In 1997, the Consumer Affairs Board of Psychology charged Oziel with “a series of offenses,” a spokesman told CNN. These included giving Smyth confidential information about his patients, having a business and sexual relationship with Smyth, supplying her with drugs, physically assaulting her twice and engaging in sexual misconduct with two female clients. (Oziel's lawyer denied the last charge, arguing that the women were not patients.) Rather than go to trial, Oziel surrendered his license “while denying any improper conduct,” his lawyer said. “He no longer practices psychology and hasn't for several years. It wasn't worth the cost and the interference in his life.”

The defense's greatest gift during the first trial may have been Oziel's mistress: an attractive woman who initially approached Oziel in hopes of getting couples therapy. When she realized she couldn't afford Oziel's sessions, she began a sexual relationship with the psychologist and became enmeshed in both his marriage and the Menendez case. After Oziel broke up with her, Smyth told authorities that Oziel had tape-recorded confessions from the Menendez brothers.