They patiently gathered the shell casings from among the pools of blood on the Oriental rug and parquet floor before leaving.Ībout 90 minutes later, police received a hysterical 911 call from one of the couple’s two handsome, tennis star sons. Although they had just filled the neighborhood with the sounds of shotgun fire, the killers seemed to be in no hurry to flee. The killers seemed intent on doing far more than ending a life: They disfigured her with 10 blasts: four into the head and one that nearly severed her hand.
His wife, Mary Louise, whom everybody called Kitty, tried to run but got no more than a few feet away. Four other blasts ripped into his arms and thigh. Only blocks from the gaudiness of Rodeo Drive, two people had sneaked into a $5-million Spanish-style mansion, once home to Elton John and Michael Jackson, and fired 15 blasts from two shotguns into one of the entertainment industry’s fastest-rising executives and his former beauty queen wife.Īpparently surprised as he snacked and watched television in the family room, Jose Menendez, a 45-year-old Cuban immigrant who ran a Van Nuys video company, was shot at point-blank range in the back of the head. “I didn’t even think it could be gunfire, especially around here.” “I didn’t think anything of it,” said Tom Zlotow, a neighbor who soon learned that the noises he’d heard from the house right behind his were echoes of the most sensational crime in the history of Beverly Hills. ON A MILD SUNDAY last summer, a string of “popping sounds” drifted through the lazy night air of Beverly Hills around 10 o’clock.