On Aug. 20, 1989, Lyle and Erik Menendez, ages 21 and 18, shot and killed their parents in the family’s Beverly Hills mansion. Both were sentenced to life in prison in 1996 after two highly publicized trials, the first of which was broadcast on the then-nascent Court TV.
But in the 35 years since the crime, the public has become increasingly divided on whether the brothers were merely the stone-cold opportunists the prosecution said they were. Now Ryan Murphy — who has a longstanding knack for taking on stories at the intersection of true crime, celebrity and media — is weighing in with a new scripted version of their story, premiering Thursday on Netflix.
Titled “Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story,” the series stars Nicholas Alexander Chavez and Cooper Koch as Lyle and Erik, with Javier Bardem and Chloë Sevigny playing their parents, Jose and Kitty Menendez. It is the second installment of the Monster anthology, created by Murphy with Ian Brennan. The first focused on the serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer.
A lot has happened since 1989 — including numerous documentaries, podcasts and a “Law & Order” series — as the case and cultural attitudes have evolved. Need to get caught up? Here’s a brief refresher and an update on more recent developments.
Jose Menendez was a successful entertainment executive who fled his native Cuba for the United States on his own at the age of 16, shortly after Fidel Castro took power. He married his college girlfriend, Mary Louise Andersen, better known as Kitty. They had two sons, and after some time on the East Coast, the family settled in the Los Angeles area.
Lyle and Erik grew up immersed in wealth and privilege: Their house in Beverly Hills was on one of the most sought-after blocks; Erik became a nationally ranked tennis player; Lyle attended Princeton University (though he was ultimately suspended). But the family had secrets. In court, both brothers testified that their father had begun molesting them at a young age and that their mother had known about it.
Reporting on the trial for The New York Times, Seth Mydans wrote of Lyle, “The defendant was in tears almost from the start as he told a story of a frightened child suffering terrifying pressures from a demanding and cruel father, and expressions of hatred from his mother.”
Kitty and Jose were watching television in their living room when their sons came in and shot them both multiple times at close range with 12-gauge shotguns.
Accounts of the timeline vary, but at some point, the brothers bought movie tickets at a local theater and went to the “Taste of L.A.” festival in Santa Monica — seemingly to create an alibi.
At 11:47 p.m., Lyle called 911, crying, and said “someone shot my parents.” The police found that in addition to the fatal shots to the head, Jose and Kitty had been shot in the kneecaps, which prosecutors later said was to make the attack appear to be a mob hit. The brothers weren’t viewed as suspects at first. Then people started to notice questionable conduct, including odd behavior at their parents’ funeral and excessive spending.
Lyle was arrested on March 8, 1990, after police received a tip from Judalon Smyth, who was having an extramarital affair with L. Jerome Oziel, the brothers’ psychologist. Smyth said she had overheard them telling Oziel that they had killed their parents; she also said he had the confession on tape. The tapes were later used as evidence in the trial after Judge James Albracht ruled that doctor-patient privilege did not apply because the brothers had threatened Oziel.
Erik was arrested days later, after returning from a tennis tournament in Israel.
In a trial that began in 1993, the brothers testified that they had killed their parents out of fear for their lives after years of sexual, emotional and physical abuse. Their cousins Andy Cano and Diane Vander Molen both testified that they had been aware of the molestation for years. Erik and Lyle said that in the days before the killings, they had confronted their parents and Jose had threatened to kill them if they didn’t keep quiet about it.
The televised trial ended in January 1994 with two deadlocked juries (each defendant had been assigned a separate jury), so a retrial was ordered. It was not televised.
In the retrial, which began in 1995, with a single jury, Judge Stanley Weisberg barred the defense from revisiting much of the abuse argument, including testimony from the brothers’ cousins and multiple character witnesses. In March 1996, each brother was convicted of two counts of first-degree murder and conspiracy to commit murder. They were sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
Over the years, the conversation around the brothers has shifted. At the time of the killings, the difficulty of escaping patterns of sexual abuse, especially when the victims are boys and men, was not always recognized. During the closing arguments of the first trial, the prosecutor David Conn said that Erik “wants you to believe his father is abusing him on a routine basis, forcing him to engage in sexual acts against his will; he expects you to believe it never occurred to him to leave.”
More recent treatments of the brothers’s stories — including several documentaries and the scripted series “Law & Order True Crime: The Menendez Murders” — have been more sympathetic toward the brothers, acknowledging the dire effects that sexual and emotional abuse can have in childhood.
At the same time, new evidence has emerged. The journalist Robert Rand, who has covered the story for decades and written a book, “The Menendez Murders,” uncovered a letter Erik wrote when he was 17 to Cano, his cousin, describing the sexual abuse by his father and how afraid he was. A 2023 Peacock docuseries, “Menendez + Menudo: Boys Betrayed,” based on reporting by Rand and Nery Ynclan, detailed new accusations by a former member of the Puerto Rican boy band Menudo that he had been sexually assaulted as a teenager by Jose.
Amid the renewed interest, the brothers and their case have become something of a social media phenomenon, with legions of young people advocating their release. In May 2023, Cliff Gardner, a lawyer for the brothers, filed a habeas corpus petition arguing that their conviction should be vacated because of the new evidence.
