Kill or Be Killed

Lyle's side of the story fills the hour. Talking with Leslie, he walks through the household: a father whose standards were humiliations, hair loss he hid under toupees, a mother who watched and did nothing, and the burglary arrest that he says pushed José from discipline toward elimination.

His claim crystallizes into the season's central legal theory — that the brothers believed their parents would kill them first. Dominick Dunne, writing from the gallery with open contempt for the defense, becomes the episode's counterweight: the voice of a public that never bought it.