This KCAL9 news segment aired at 9 pm on July 27, 1993.
I became a reluctant witness in the trial when I caught a major prosecution witness in a lie, all because of an audiotaped interview he did with me a year before.
The witness was a Princeton friend of Lyle Menendez.
The friend, Donovan Goodreau, exchanged the mutual confessions with Lyle in the spring before the murders. BOTH boys been sexually molested when they were kids.
I busted Goodreau after he denied that conversation ever took place. I shared my interview with an L.A. TV station on 7/27/93, as you can see in these videos. Goodreau was confronted with the TV news stories the next day in court.
On the advice of my attorney, I was trying to avoid a subpoena from the defense by publishing my interview on a TV newscast. Instead, the prosecution served me with a subpoena.
The first Menendez trial was shut down for the day and the juries were sent home so that an evidence hearing could be held to resolve the dispute.
It was a surreal experience to be on the witness stand looking down at Lyle, Erik and the attorneys as I was questioned by prosecutor Pam Bozanich. The D.A. was nasty and arrogant because I had blown up one of her witnesses. The hearing was carried live on Court TV – my dad was watching at home in Ohio. I testified along with Goodreau and Glenn Stevens – another prosecution witness (and Lyle’s roommate at Princeton who’d become a Beverly Hills PD informant.)
After court, my media friends aimed their cameras at me with questions about the controversy. It was another bizarre moment covering a trial that was full of them. Later, I found an October 1990 taped interview with Glenn Stevens in which he told me that Lyle had confided in him four months before the murders that the brothers had been molested.
The conversation took place when they were visiting the neighborhood where Lyle grew up in Monsey, N.Y. In the interview, Stevens expressed his surprise that Lyle had told Donovan about the molestation. (This was several years before the abuse of Erik and Lyle was revealed in the media.)
Why is this a big deal?
Glenn Stevens, Donovan Goodreau and Andy Cano – Erik’s cousin and a key defense witness — knew BEFORE the murders that Lyle and Erik had been molested. So much for that theory that the defense was cooked up in a smoke-filled room.
I should have been covered by California’s shield law that protects a reporter’s unpublished notes and interviews. Judge Stanley Weisberg was angry and made a narrow ruling that book authors were not shielded.
If I hadn’t turned over the tape, I would’ve been held in contempt and thrown in jail. In the end, it was a case of “be careful what you wish for.”
The prosecution heard the entire two-and-a-half-hour interview and realized there was much more detail about Lyle and Donovan discussing being molested.
The DAs never introduced the tape in court, but the defense brought Goodreau back and confronted him with his own words.
What happened?
It’s in the book.
This followup news segment aired at 10 pm on July 27, 1993