Toupee, Shotguns, and an L.A. Murder

o what happened? I’ll tell you what happened. I was there, and these are my beliefs. Two juries took the word of two world-class liars, two rich, spoiled, arrogant losers who were already on the road to a criminal life when they shot their mother’s face off and their father’s brains out. Two juries made up of people the killers privately expressed to friends and confidants they didn’t quite consider to be their peers fell for their pretty faces, their crocodile tears, and their extravagant lies. Correction. Not all the jurors did. Only some of them. And that’s all it takes to hang a jury. Those who went along with the defense were in the thrall of a tiny, mesmerizing, brilliant, overpowering 50-year-old woman who dominated the proceedings from the beginning to the end of a six-month trial, leaving everyone in the dust behind her. She was impassioned. She was moving. She was possessed with fervor. She was often enraged. She was also mean, harsh, crude, and gutter-mouthed. Even the two well-known but uncivilized words ending with u-c-k-e-r were not alien to her vocabulary. She reserved one for the prosecution’s chief witness, Dr. L. Jerome Oziel, to whom the killers had confessed their crime. She reserved the other for Judge Stanley M. Weisberg, who had made a ruling in which she didn’t agree. “And you can print that,” she snapped at one reporter in the elevator after her attack on the judge.