A Christmas to Remember

After 22 years of separation, a pair of devoted brothers are spending their first Christmas together tomorrow.  According to that reliable source of information, the Daily Mail, convicted killer brothers Lyle and Erik Menendez are going to spend the day enjoying the festivities at a California prison.  As we know, the pair executed by gunshot their parents,  music executive Jose Menendez and wife Kitty,  in 1989 as they were eating ice cream while watching television.  As we also know, the sons dodged the death penalty and instead both brothers are serving life without parole but have been incarcerated at different prisons in California until this past spring, when both brothers wound up in the same prison and in the same unit.  As we also know, their despicable attorneys, including Leslie Abramson, peddled the absolutely ludicrous notion their father "abused" them, and therefore they couldn't help but kill both parents after the "victimized" brothers were both legal adults.  Standard operating procedure by amoral attorneys making the victims the criminals and the criminals the victims when the guilt, premeditation, and motive are obvious.  In the end, it didn't get the brats off the hook.  They will die in prison.  Lyle is now 50, while Erik is now 48, which is longer than their parents had on this earth.

The REAL reason the parents were murdered was because of simple greed.  Jose Menendez was certainly a very driven man.  He became a millionaire executive at a very young age, and he naturally expected his sons inherited his drive.  He wanted the sons to become professional tennis players and graduate from an Ivy League university, but the boys really didn't have any ambition at all.  Jose was a type A personality, while Lyle and Erik were type Zs.  No ambition at all, just a pair of losers like so many kids of the rich.  They wanted the good life, but they weren't willing to lift a finger to get it.

Kitty and Jose Menendez flanked by their spoiled brat sons

In the end, Jose threw up his hands and threatened to disinherit his sons.  A big mistake.  A big, big, big mistake.  He wasn't the only millionaire to make threats to disinherit his spoiled brat children and pay the ultimate price.  One can look at Fresno's Dana Ewell, whose father Dale planned to disinherit Dana after an outrageous report in the Los Angeles Times made Dana the one who was a self-made millionaire rather than his father.  Dana, who was smart but not that smart, conned a friend of his to be a hit man and wipe out his entire family, which is what happened.  Unfortunately for Dana, he ultimately got caught.  What REALLY did it was he pointed his hit man toward where his father's ammunition was to kill his parents and sister, and of course the cops traced where they were purchased and by whom.  Pure genius, Dana.  He is rotting in prison now instead of inheriting the 8 million or so he stood to gain.

One can also look at the case of Franklin Bradshaw, the oddball Salt Lake City auto parts millionaire who was shot dead by his grandson in 1978 at the behest of his mother, Bradshaw's youngest daughter Frances Schreuder.  Same thing.  She was spoiled rotten, too, and lived a life of luxury in NYC on daddy's money, but then she was living way beyond her means.  Instead of going out and getting a job, she had her sons visit their grandfather in Utah to steal a couple hundred thousand  in stock certificates and such.  Bradshaw was furious and threatened to disinherit her.  At that point, Frances' plan to have one of her sons murder her father went into action.  She was eventually caught, and she and her son served prison time and eventually were released.  Frances died in 2004.

As for the Menendez brothers, they panicked.  They were worried they would be cut off from the 10 to 12 million they stood to inherit from their parents.  They had to devise a plan, which they did, and they carried it out.  Unfortunately for them, their motive for the  murders was too obvious in the weeks and months afterward.  They spent money like drunken sailors, wasting it on new cars, places to live, and business ventures that flopped.  The attorneys got the rest of the money, and the boys were ultimately left flat broke.  Not very smart.

Still, there are people out there who bought into their "abuse excuse" bullshit, which was nothing more or less than legal gamesmanship.  Most people, however, did not.  The brothers mostly stayed quiet for the past 25 years, and, because they didn't have much else to look forward to, became born-again Christians like Dana Ewell.

What a reunion tomorrow will bring!

From the article:

Asked if he had a gift for brother Erik or whether he had made him a festive card, Lyle responded: 'I haven't done anything like that, but that's not a bad idea maybe I will.'

He added: 'I think for us the gift is just being here together. It can be bittersweet, right, because being together brings back a lot of memories and things from the past... it's like seeing a family member that you have so much history with, not all of it good.

'But at the same time it's just, two decades being separated, every day is sort of shocking. So to just see my brother is just sort of a shock, so I don't think it'd be any different on Christmas.'

Well, Lyle, if you and your brother hadn't been such greedheads and killed your parents, you wouldn't have to be incarcerated in the first place.