On the evening of 20 August 1989, José and Kitty Menéndez were watching TV in the den of their Beverly Hills mansion when their two sons, Lyle and Erik, entered the room carrying 12-gauge shotguns. Police sources told the Los Angeles Times that a gun barrel was thrust into José’s mouth after he’d already been shot four times, and a final blast blew off the back of his head. Kitty, who was shot 10 times, attempted to crawl away while her sons reloaded, before receiving a fatal blast to the cheek. Hours later, the older brother, Lyle, called 911, sobbing to the dispatcher: “Somebody killed my parents!”
Now, 35 years on, the notorious murders are the subject of a new Ryan Murphy drama on Netflix, titled Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story. Javier Bardem and Chloë Sevigny star as the parents, Nicholas Chavez and Cooper Koch as the sons. It’s the second in Murphy’s controversial true-crime saga, the first edition of which reignited interest in the “Milwaukee Cannibal”, Jeffrey Dahmer. That show, titled Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story and starring Evan Peters as the bespectacled serial killer, went stratospheric, hitting 1 billion hours of views in its first 60 days and prompting widespread debate about the glamorisation of murderers. This time, though, things are different. This time, the “monsters” might just be the victims.
During the brothers’ trials, which took place from 1993 to 1996, Lyle and Erik – who were 21 and 18 at the time of the killings – claimed they had endured a lifetime of abuse at the hands of their father, a millionaire Hollywood entertainment executive. The defence therefore argued that the pair should be tried for manslaughter, not murder, further alleging that José had threatened to kill his sons to keep them quiet. It didn’t work. On 2 July 1996, Lyle and Erik were convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison without parole. But more than three decades on, in time for the arrival of Netflix’s highly anticipated new series, fresh evidence has the potential to set them free.
Two months after the murders took place, Robert Rand, a journalist for the Miami Herald who perhaps knows the case better than anyone, travelled to Los Angeles to interview the Menéndez family. At the time, the brothers had not yet been arrested, and it was widely believed that the mafia was responsible for the deaths of José and Kitty in connection to José’s status as a wealthy home video executive.
“I spent three days with Erik and Lyle. They were not suspects, publicly. I had absolutely no reason to be suspicious of them,” Rand tells me now. “They were telling me very loving, emotional stories about how close-knit their family was.” Little did Rand know, it would be the first of many times he met with the brothers over the next three and a half decades for a story that would define his career. His 2018 book, The Menendez Murders: The Shocking Untold Story of the Menendez Family and the Killings that Stunned the Nation, has just been re-released with a new epilogue revealing crucial information uncovered in the past six years.
Previously, the brothers claimed they had gone to the cinema to watch Batman the night their parents were killed. In reality, they had dumped the guns somewhere off of Mulholland Drive, then driven to a movie theatre and bought tickets to a film they didn’t watch before returning home to the crime scene. During the 1989 interview, Erik chillingly told Rand: “I’ve never seen anything like it, never will see anything like it. They looked like wax. I’ve never seen my dad helpless, and it’s sad to think he would ever be.”
In the trailer for Murphy’s new series – screeners were not available to press for the release – Erik and Lyle are shown going on a lavish spending spree in the wake of their parents’ deaths. Indeed, in the seven months between the murders and their arrest, the brothers spent an estimated $700,000. Lyle bought a Porsche 911 Carrera to replace the “piece of s***” Alfa Romeo his father had given him, as well as $40,000 worth of clothes and a $15,000 Rolex watch. His more eccentric purchases included a $300,000 down payment on a buffalo wing restaurant in Princeton, New Jersey, where he had attended college.
Eventually, Erik confessed to the killings to his psychologist, Jerome Oziel. Lyle was furious and allegedly threatened to kill the doctor. Unbeknown to them, Oziel’s mistress, Judalon Smyth, was listening through the door. “I never thought I believed in evil, but when I heard those boys speak, I did,” she told investigative journalist Dominic Dunne (portrayed in Monsters by Nathan Lane) in 1990. After a messy breakup with Oziel, it was Smyth who alerted police to the existence of therapy session tape recordings in which the Menéndez brothers admitted to the murders of their parents.
After their arrest in March 1990, it took three years to get Lyle and Erik on the stand as lawyers debated whether using the tapes as evidence violated doctor-patient privilege. The trial was broadcast on Court TV, garnering international attention. “You have to remember that back in the 1990s there was no internet, no social media,” Rand tells me. “So once the mainstream media set the profile or the agenda for the case – greedy, rich kids kill parents – that was it, you were cooked. And it was very difficult for the defence to fight back.”
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The brothers admitted to killing their parents, but contended that they did so out of fear, especially of their father, who they claimed was a violent paedophile. As evidence, the defence called on several family members to testify. Lyle and Erik’s cousin Brian Andersen said José would have the boys shower with him after tennis practice. He told the jury: “As soon as José took either one of the boys into their room, the door was locked behind them, and Kitty made clear you did not go down the hallway.” Another cousin, Diane Vander Molen, testified that Lyle had confided in her about the abuse when he was just eight years old. She said he had asked to sleep in her room one night “because his father and him had been touching each other down there, indicating that it was his genital area”.
Nevertheless, prosecutors argued that even if Lyle and Erik were abused, it didn’t give them the right to kill. They pointed to the therapy confession, during which they did not mention self-defence or fearing for their lives. The brothers were retried and found guilty after a first trial ended with jurors deadlocked. Both were convicted on two counts of first-degree murder and sentenced to life. “Eric and Lyle Menéndez have been incarcerated for 34 years and six months, and I believe that they are in prison for killing their lifelong abusers,” Rand says. “The correct verdict for the Menéndez brothers trial should have been manslaughter, not murder.”
Over the past three decades, Rand has conducted countless interviews with Menéndez family members and José’s affiliates. Last year, another alleged victim of José’s abuse came forward. In the 2023 Peacock docuseries Menendez + Menudo: Boys Betrayed (co-produced by Rand), Roy Rosselló, a former member of the Puerto Rican boy band sensation Menudo, claims he was drugged and raped by José when he was a teenager. At the time, José was the head of RCA Records. “We believe that Roy was ‘gifted’ to José Menéndez after José signed Menudo to a $30m contract,” Rand tells me. In the documentary, Erik tells Rand from prison: “I always hoped and believed that one day the truth about my dad would come out. But I never wished for it to come out like this: the result of trauma that another child has suffered.”
The day after the documentary premiered, appellate attorneys for the Menéndez brothers filed a habeas petition to vacate their 1996 convictions based on new evidence. The petition lists Rosselló’s revelations and a letter written from Erik to his cousin, Andy Cano, in December 1988 – months before the murders. In the letter, which Rand was given by José’s younger sister and Andy’s mother, Marta Cano, an 18-year-old Erik writes: “I’ve been trying to avoid dad. It’s still happening, Andy, but it’s worse for me now… Every night I stay up thinking he might come in… I’m afraid… He’s crazy. He’s warned me a hundred times about telling anyone, especially Lyle.”
The brothers’ attorneys are now hoping they will be resentenced to time served and let out of prison. They are now aged 53 and 56. Thanks to events like the #MeToo movement, Rand argues, our understanding of abuse victims has changed drastically since the Menéndez siblings first went on trial. Lyle’s prosecutor, Pam Bozanich, for instance, had even argued in the Nineties that “men could not be raped, because they lack the necessary equipment to be raped”.
“Back in 1993, I interviewed every juror after the first trial,” Rand says. “All the women voted for manslaughter. All the men voted for murder. All the men said to me, ‘Well, a father would never do that to his sons, right?’ … I think that we have evolved as a society over the past 30 years and we are much more willing to accept that these things really do happen, not only to women, but also to men.”
‘Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story’ arrives on Netflix on Thursday 19 September