Chapter Eighteen
Eighteen
Jesus Menendez was serving a life sentence in San Quentin because he had wiped his penis on a bathroom towel. No matter how you looked at it, that is what it really came down to. That towel had been his biggest mistake.
Sitting spread-legged on the concrete floor of my warehouse, the contents of Menendez files fanned out around me, I was reacquainting myself with the facts of the case I had worked two years before.
Menendez was convicted of killing Martha Renteria after following her home to Panorama City from a strip club in East Hollywood called The Cobra Room.
He raped her and then stabbed her more than fifty times, causing so much blood to leave her body that it seeped through the bed and formed a puddle on the wood floor below it.
In another day it seeped through cracks in the floor and formed a drip from the ceiling in the apartment below. That is when the police were called.
The case against Menendez was formidable but circumstantial.
He had also hurt himself by admitting to police—before I was on the case—that he had been in her apartment on the night of the murder.
But it was the DNA on the fluffy pink towel in the victim’s bathroom that ultimately did him in.
It couldn’t be neutralized. It was a spinning plate that couldn’t be knocked down.
Defense pros call a piece of evidence like this the iceberg because it is the evidence that sinks the ship.
I had taken on the Menendez murder case as what I would call a “loss leader.” Menendez had no money to pay for the kind of time and effort it would take to mount a thorough defense but the case had garnered substantial publicity and I was willing to trade my time and work for the free advertising.
Menendez had come to me because just a few months before his arrest I had successfully defended his older brother Fernando in a heroin case.
At least in my opinion I had been successful.
I had gotten a possession and sales charge knocked down to a simple possession. He got probation instead of prison.
Those good efforts resulted in Fernando calling me on the night Jesus was arrested for the murder of Martha Renteria.
Jesus had gone to the Van Nuys Division to voluntarily talk to detectives.
A drawing of his face had been shown on every television channel in the city and was getting heavy rotation in particular on the Spanish channels.
He had told his family that he would go to the detectives to straighten things out and be back.
But he never came back, so his brother called me.
I told the brother that the lesson to be learned was never to go to the detectives to straighten things out until after you’ve consulted an attorney.
I had already seen numerous television news reports on the murder of the exotic dancer, as Renteria had been labeled, when Menendez’s brother called me.
The reports had included the police artist’s drawing of the Latin male believed to have followed her from the club.
I knew that the pre-arrest media interest meant the case would likely be carried forward in the public consciousness by the television news and I might be able to get a good ride out of it.
I agreed to take the case on the come line.
For free. Pro bono. For the good of the system.
Besides, murder cases are few and far between.
I take them when I can get them. Menendez was the twelfth accused murderer I had defended.
The first eleven were still in prison but none of them were on death row. I considered that a good record.
By the time I got to Menendez in a holding cell at Van Nuys Division, he had already given a statement that implicated him to the police.
He had told detectives Howard Kurlen and Don Crafton that he had not followed Renteria home, as suggested by the news reports, but had been an invited guest to her apartment.
He explained that earlier in the day he had won eleven hundred dollars on the California lotto and had been willing to trade some of it to Renteria for some of her attention.
He said that at her apartment they had engaged in consensual sex—although he did not use those words—and that when he left she was alive and five hundred dollars in cash richer.
The holes Kurlen and Crafton punched in Menendez’s story were many.
First of all, there had been no state lotto on the day of or day before the murder and the neighborhood mini-market where he said he had cashed his winning ticket had no record of paying out an eleven-hundred-dollar win to Menendez or anyone else.
Additionally, no more than eighty dollars in cash was found in the victim’s apartment.
And lastly, the autopsy report indicated that bruising and other damage to the interior of the victim’s vagina precluded what could be considered consensual sexual relations.
The medical examiner concluded that she had been brutally raped.
No fingerprints other than the victim’s were found in the apartment.
The place had been wiped clean. No semen was found in the victim’s body, indicating her rapist had used a condom or had not ejaculated during the assault.
But in the bathroom off the bedroom where the attack and murder had taken place, a crime scene investigator using a black light found a small amount of semen on a pink towel hanging on a rack near the toilet.
The theory that came into play was that after the rape and murder the killer had stepped into the bathroom, removed the condom and flushed it down the toilet.
He had then wiped his penis with the nearby towel and then hung the towel back on the rack.
When cleaning up after the crime and wiping surfaces he might have touched, he forgot about that towel.
The investigators kept the discovery of the DNA deposit and their attendant theory secret. It never made it into the media. It would become Kurlen and Crafton’s hole card.
Based on Menendez’s lies and the admission that he had been in the victim’s apartment, he was arrested on suspicion of murder and held without bail.
Detectives got a search warrant, and oral swabs were collected from Menendez and sent to the lab for DNA typing and comparison to the DNA recovered from the bathroom towel.
That was about when I entered the case. As they say in my profession, by then the Titanic had already left the dock.
The iceberg was out there waiting. Menendez had badly hurt himself by talking—and lying—to the detectives.
Still, unaware of the DNA comparison that was under way, I saw a glimmer of light for Jesus Menendez.
There was a case to be made for neutralizing his interview with detectives—which, by the way, became a full-blown confession by the time it got reported by the media.
Menendez was Mexican born and had come to this country at age eight.
His family spoke only Spanish at home and he had attended a school for Spanish speakers until dropping out at age fourteen.
He spoke only rudimentary English, and his cognition level of the language seemed to me to be even lower than his speaking level.
Kurlen and Crafton made no effort to bring in a translator and, according to the taped interview, not once asked if Menendez even wanted one.
This was the crack I would work my way into.
The interview was the foundation of the case against Menendez.
It was the spinning platter. If I could knock it down most of the other plates would come down with it.
My plan was to attack the interview as a violation of Menendez’s rights because he could not have understood the Miranda warning he had been read by Kurlen or the document listing these rights in English that he had signed at the detective’s request.
This is where the case stood until two weeks after Menendez’s arrest when the lab results came back matching his DNA to that found on the towel in the victim’s bathroom.
After that the prosecution didn’t need the interview or his admissions.
The DNA put Menendez directly on the scene of a brutal rape and murder.
I could try an O.J. defense—attack the credibility of the DNA match.
But prosecutors and lab techs had learned so much from that debacle and in the years since that I knew I was unlikely of prevailing with a jury.
The DNA was the iceberg and the momentum of the ship made it impossible to steer around it in time.
The district attorney himself revealed the DNA findings at a press conference and announced that his office would seek the death penalty for Menendez.
He added that detectives had also located three eyewitnesses who had seen Menendez throw a knife into the Los Angeles River.
The DA said the river was searched for the weapon but it was not recovered.
Regardless, he characterized the witness accounts as solid—they were Menendez’s three roommates.
Based on the prosecution’s case coming together and the threat of the death penalty, I decided the O.J.
defense would be too risky. Using Fernando Menendez as my translator, I went to the Van Nuys jail and told Jesus that his only hope was for a deal the DA had floated by me.
If Menendez would plead guilty to murder I could get him a life sentence with the possibility of parole.
I told him he’d be out in fifteen years. I told him it was the only way.