Thirty-five years after their crimes, Erik and Lyle Menendez, the pair of infamous siblings who shockingly killed their parents in the family’s sprawling Beverly Hills mansion, once more are captivating the public.
Prosecutors in the televised 1993 trial asserted that Lyle, 21 at the time of the murders, and Erik, then 18, shot José and Mary Louise “Kitty” Menendez for the couple’s $14 million fortune. But Erik and Lyle claim they feared for their lives and suffered physical, sexual and emotional abuse at the hands of their father. Lyle says the abuse by his father for him ended at age 8, but Erik testified that his father’s abuse began when he was 6 and lasted until the time of the murders. Part of the brothers’ motivation for killing their parents was to free Erik from the abuse, which Kitty supposedly knew about and did nothing to stop.
Netflix’s “Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story,” a scripted drama from producer Ryan Murphy, thrust the siblings (and Lyle’s hairpiece) into the spotlight and Netflix’s Top 10 list. Erik has condemned the nine-episode series for its “horrible narrative through vile and appalling character portrayals of Lyle and of me and disheartening slander.” (Murphy responded to the criticism by suggesting to The Hollywood Reporter that “The Menendez brothers should be sending me flowers. They haven’t had so much attention in 30 years.”)
He’s not wrong about renewed interest. Thursday, reality star and aspiring attorney Kim Kardashian pleaded for the brothers’ life sentences to be “reconsidered” in an essay published by NBC News. The same day, Los Angeles County District Attorney George Gascón held a news conference and said the office was reviewing new evidence.
The brothers’ attorneys have filed petitions for authorities to review new evidence and consider resentencing based on their level of rehabilitation and overall conduct in prison, Gascón said. A hearing on the new evidence is set for Nov. 29.
The documentary “The Menendez Brothers,” now streaming on Netflix, gives Erik, 53, and Lyle, 56, their turn to speak via recorded phone calls from the Richard J. Donovan Correctional Facility in San Diego. (More of the interviews, conducted by director Alejandro Hartmann, are featured in a three-part Menendez series due Oct. 9 on Netflix’s You Can’t Make This Up podcast.)
Hartmann says he focuses on the Menendez brothers’ first trial, which resulted in two deadlocked juries, as it felt “unresolved” and “inspired this amazing TikTok movement” in which a new generation began dissecting the tragedy. “We thought that taking the trial would link us with the new perspective of the case,” he says.
Hartmann interviews family members and Pamela Bozanich, the prosecutor for the first trial. Hazel Thornton, a juror, tells the filmmaker that during deliberations, “all of the men raised hands in favor of first-degree murder, and none of the women raised their hands.”
“I think the men had a really hard time accepting the fact that a young man could possibly be abused by his father,” she adds, “and the women were more empathetic in terms of understanding issues of abuse.”
“It’s been 34 years of incarceration,” Lyle says in the documentary. “And for the first time, I feel like it’s a conversation where people now can understand and believe.”
Here are the revelations from “The Menendez Brothers”:
Erik is baffled that police didn’t suspect the brothers: ‘Gunpowder residue was all over our hands’
In the documentary, Erik expresses shock that the police didn’t initially view the brothers as suspects. Erik points out he told detectives he saw smoke in the den where his parents were shot, “which would have been impossible if I didn’t do it.”
Besides, “the gunpowder residue was all over our hands,” he says. “There were gun shells in my car. And if they would have just pressed me, I wouldn’t have been able to withstand any questioning. I was in a completely broken and shattered state of mind.”
Spending spree ‘was to cover up this horrible pain’
Murphy’s “Monsters” includes the brothers’ inordinate spending after their parents’ deaths, as Lyle (played by Nicholas Alexander Chavez) proclaims to Erik (Cooper Koch) that “we are living our best lives.”
In real life, the brothers did go on a spending spree, buying a Porsche, Rolexes and even a restaurant. But Erik says that “the idea that I was having a good time is absurd.”
The shopping “was to cover up this horrible pain of not wanting to be alive,” he says. “One of the things that kept me from killing myself is I felt like I would be a complete failure to my dad at that point.”
Lyle says he was “actually sobbing a lot at night, sleeping poorly, very distraught at times and kind of adrift throughout all those months.”
Prosecutor: José’s death was a ‘plus for mankind’
“I couldn’t find anyone to say anything nice about José Menedez, except for his secretary,” Bozanich says, “and everybody else had just these awful stories about him and what a monster he was. The loss of José Menendez, in my mind, was an actual plus for mankind.”
Erik testified that when he tried to reject his father’s sexual advances, José threated him with a large knife. Putting the blade to his neck, he added, his father said, “I should kill you, and next time I will.” On the stand, Erik claimed his father threatened to kill him if he told anyone about the abuse.
In the documentary, Lyle says he believes “part of this disastrous weekend occurred from me just being naive that somehow I could rescue Erik with no consequence. I could confront my father, that my mother would somehow react for the first time in her life like a mother. Those were very unrealistic expectations.”
José Menendez’s abuse allegedly extended beyond his sons. Roy Rosselló, a member of the 1980s Puerto Rican boy band Menudo, said in Peacock’s docuseries, 2023 “Menendez + Menudo: Boys Betrayed” that José Menendez drugged and raped him when he was a teenager.
Erik and Lyle Menendez await district attorney’s decision
The brothers were reunited at Donovan in 2018 after being imprisoned separately for more than 20 years, But their reunion doesn’t wash away Erik’s guilt for telling Lyle about his father’s alleged abuse and confessing the crimes to his therapist Jerome Oziel.
“I got him into every aspect of this tragedy,” Erik says. “Every aspect of this tragedy is my fault.”
Lyle wrestles with whether he really saved his brother; Erik ended up in prison. “There comes a point where you just realize, ‘OK, it’s impossible … I couldn’t rescue all of us.’”
Though they were sentenced to life without parole, Erik and Lyle filed a habeas corpus petition to vacate their convictions in May 2023, citing new evidence.
The new evidence Gascón and his office will review includes a photocopied letter that one of the brothers allegedly sent to another family member claiming he was the victim of molestation.
Prosecutors were also given evidence by one of the brothers’ attorneys alleging that he had been molested by his father, according to Gascón, who added that none of the claims brought forth by the defense have been confirmed.
