TRIALS: Time for Judgment: Lynch or Sam?

It was a trial that had everything —indeed, too much of everything. There was a lanky young heir to a multimillion-dollar fortune as the central figure in a murky kidnaping plot, a desperate defendant charging that the whole caper had been an elaborate fake, and there were allegations about a homosexual liaison carried out in locales ranging from the pool-house of a secluded suburban estate to gay bars in Manhattan.

But as the trial probing the kidnaping of Seagram Liquor Heir Samuel Bronfman II neared an end last week, the case remained almost as mysterious as it was sensational. Since the...