Murder as therapy: in a Van Nuys courtroom, two pairs of people are on trial: Lyle and Erik Menendez for murdering their parents; and Jose and Kitty Menendez for child abuse. Can they all be guilty? - California trial

National Review, Nov 29, 1993 by Stuart Goldman

In the cosmology of the self-help movement, all human failure stems from our lack of ability to love ourselves; the worst thing a person can have is a bad case of low self-esteem. In the Menendez family, where approval was rarely forthcoming from the boys' perfectionist father, selfesteem was difficult to maintain. In the end, though, the brothers seem to feel they would have gotten the approval they sought all their lives. Lyle Menendez (who, only days after he'd blown his parents to smithereens, gave a moving, thirty-minute eulogy testifying to what a great man his father was) stated in court, "I think my father would have been proud of me [for murdering him]." When the stupefied prosecutor asked if he really meant that, Lyle answered unblinkingly that he believed his father would have admired the fact that he had finally stood up to him (not to mention that he'd done it in such a convincing fashion).

But the most dumbfounding testimony came from Erik, who ultimately confessed the murders to his therapist, Jerome Oziel, and later to his friend Craig Ciguarelli. When asked why he had confessed, Erik, who admitted he was wracked with guilt after the murders, said, "I needed someone to tell me that I was really a good person." If guilt is indeed a response to our Godgiven knowledge of right and wrong, good and evil, then this statement is particularly repugnant. The young man who had just blown away his parents wanted to be told, "I'm OK, you're OK."

Whether the Menendez brothers go to prison (it seems unlikely that they will receive the death penalty) or whether they return to their Beverly Hills mansion and their tennis courts, they must live forever with the fact of their evil deed. But in a world where morality is dictated by therapists rather than God, where evil is discounted as myth, where feeling good is the end-all and be-all, they can be comforted by the thought that murdering an "abusive" parent is not only permissible-it's healthy.

Increasingly, this cut-price nihilism pervades the moral climate of modern America--its schoolrooms, law offices, television studios, welfare offices, mainline liberal churches and temples, and wherever two or three Ivy League PhDs are gathered together in Freud's name. We have known for some time that this climate produced ghetto kids who would kill for a sneaker; we now know that it also shapes rich kids who will kill for a swimming pool, two tennis courts, and a Porsche.

For believers in this cheap, ersatz ethical system, remorse has been replaced by self-pity and self-righteousness, truth has been traded for moral relativism, and the only thing one can ever be guilty of is bad judgment. Of all the ugliness we've had to witness in the Menendez case, this fact is perhaps the most shameful.