Menendez Brothers’ Defense Rests

Lyle Menendez, whose tearful testimony about a family life fraught with cruelty and incest mesmerized a national television audience two years ago, kept his silence Wednesday as the defense rested at the brothers’ retrial for the 1989 murders of their wealthy parents.

Defense attorney Charles A. Gessler said Lyle, 28, did not testify because “there’s no need.” Instead, he will rely on the testimony by younger brother Erik Menendez, which laid out the brothers’ defense that a lifetime of abuse caused them to kill because they feared for their lives.

As in the first trial, Erik Menendez testified that his father molested him from the time he was 6 until he killed his parents at age 18. He testified that Lyle had told him that he, too, was molested by their father between ages 6 and 8. The brothers’ first trial ended in January 1993 with jurors deadlocked between murder and manslaughter convictions.