The true story behind Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez story could free brothers after 35 years

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On the evening of August 20, 1989, José and Kitty Menéndez were watching television in the living room of their Beverly Hills mansion when their two sons, Lyle and Erik, entered the room with 12-gauge shotguns. Police sources told the Los Angeles Times that after being shot four times, Jose had a gun barrel shoved into his mouth and a final salvo ripped off the back of his head. Kitty, who had been shot ten times, tried to crawl away while her sons reloaded before she was fatally shot in the cheek. Hours later, older brother Lyle called 911 and sobbed to the emergency dispatcher, “Someone killed my parents!”

Now, 35 years later, the infamous murders are the subject of a new Ryan Murphy drama on Netflix called Monster: The Story of Lyle and Erik Menendez. Javier Bardem and Chloë Sevigny play the parents, Nicholas Chavez and Cooper Koch the sons. It is the second part of Murphy’s controversial true crime saga, the first installment of which reignited interest in the “Milwaukee Cannibal” Jeffrey Dahmer. This show, titled Monsters: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story and starring Evan Peters as a bespectacled serial killer, the film garnered a billion hours of viewing in its first 60 days and sparked a widespread debate about the glorification of murderers. This time, however, it’s 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 murders — claimed they had suffered their entire lives of abuse at the hands of their father, a millionaire Hollywood entertainment executive. The defense therefore argued that the two should be charged with manslaughter rather than murder, and further claimed that José had threatened to kill his sons to keep them quiet. It didn’t work. On July 2, 1996, Lyle and Erik were found guilty of murder and sentenced to life in prison without parole. But more than three decades later, in time for the release of Netflix’s highly anticipated new series, new evidence may free them.

Two months after the murders, Robert Rand, a journalist for the Miami-Herald who perhaps knows the case better than anyone else, traveled to Los Angeles to interview the Menéndez family. At that point, the brothers had not yet been arrested, and it was widely believed that the Mafia was responsible for the deaths of José and Kitty, as José was a wealthy home video executive.

“I spent three days with Erik and Lyle. They were not suspects, not publicly. I had absolutely no reason to be suspicious of them,” Rand tells me now. “They told me very loving, emotional stories about how close their family was.” Little did Rand know that this would be the first of many meetings with the brothers over the next three and a half decades for a story that would shape his career. His 2018 book, The Menendez Murders: The Shocking, Untold Story of the Menendez Family and the Murders That Shocked the Nationhas just been re-released with a new epilogue that reveals crucial information from the last six years.

Previously, the brothers claimed that they had gone to the cinema to Batman the night their parents were killed. In reality, they had planted the weapons somewhere near Mulholland Drive, then driven to a movie theater and bought tickets for a film they had not seen before returning home to the crime scene. During the 1989 interview, Erik Rand said with dismay, “I have never seen anything like it and I will never see anything like it. They looked like wax. I have never seen my father helpless, and it is sad to think that he could ever be.”

In the trailer for Murphy’s new series – no screeners were available for the release – Erik and Lyle are seen going on a lavish shopping spree after the deaths of their parents. In fact, the brothers spent an estimated $700,000 in the seven months between the murders and their arrests. Lyle bought a Porsche 911 Carrera to replace the “shitty” Alfa Romeo his father had given him, as well as $40,000 worth of clothing and a $15,000 Rolex watch. Among his more eccentric purchases was a $300,000 down payment on a Buffalo wing restaurant in Princeton, New Jersey, where he had been a student.

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Eventually, Erik confessed to the murders to his psychologist Jerome Oziel. Lyle was furious and allegedly threatened to kill the doctor. Unbeknownst to them, Oziel’s lover Judalon Smyth was listening through the door. “I never thought I believed in evil, but when I heard those guys talk, I did,” she told investigative journalist Dominic Dunne (portrayed in Monster by Nathan Lane) in 1990. After a messy split with Oziel, it was Smyth who alerted police to the existence of tape recordings of therapy sessions in which the Menéndez brothers admitted to murdering their parents.

After their arrest in March 1990, it took three years for Lyle and Erik to take the stand, while lawyers debated whether using the tapes as evidence violated doctor-patient confidentiality. The trial was televised on court and attracted international attention. “You have to remember that in the 1990s there was no internet and no social media,” Rand tells me. “Once the mainstream media set the profile or agenda for the case – greedy rich kids killing their parents – you were done. And it was very difficult for the defense to fight back.”

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The brothers admitted killing their parents but claimed they did so out of fear, particularly of their father, who they claimed was a violent pedophile. As evidence, the defense called several family members to testify. Brian Andersen, Lyle and Erik’s cousin, testified that José made the boys shower with him after tennis practice. He told the jury, “As soon as José took one of the boys into their room, the door was locked behind them, and Kitty made it clear that they were not going down the hall.” Another cousin, Diane Vander Molen, testified that Lyle confided in her about the abuse when he was just eight years old. She said he asked to sleep in her room one night “because his father and he had been touching each other down there and implying that that was his genital area.”

Still, prosecutors argued that even if Lyle and Erik had been abused, that did not give them the right to kill. They pointed to the therapy confession in which they did not mention self-defense or fear for their lives. The brothers were retried and found guilty after an initial trial ended in a jury deadlock. Both were found guilty of two counts of premeditated murder and sentenced to life in prison. “Eric and Lyle Menéndez have been incarcerated for 34 years and six months, and I believe they are in prison for killing their lifelong tormentors,” Rand says. “The correct verdict in the Menéndez brothers’ trial should have been manslaughter, not murder.”

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Over the past three decades, Rand has conducted countless interviews with members of the Menéndez family and José’s confidants. Last year, another alleged victim of José’s abuse came forward. In the 2023 Peacock docuseries Menendez + Menudo: Betrayed Boys (co-producer Rand), Roy Rosselló, a former member of Puerto Rican boy band sensation Menudo, claims he was drugged and raped as a teenager by José, who was head of RCA Records at the time. “We believe Roy was ‘gifted’ to José Menéndez after José Menudo signed a $30 million contract,” Rand tells me. In the documentary, Erik Rand says from prison, “I always hoped and believed that one day the truth about my father would come out. But I never wanted it to come out this way: as a result of trauma suffered by another child.”

A day after the documentary premiered, appellate lawyers for the Menéndez brothers filed a habeas corpus petition to overturn their 1996 convictions based on new evidence. The petition lists Rosselló’s revelations and a letter Erik wrote to his cousin Andy Cano in December 1988 – months before the murders. In the letter, which Rand obtained from José’s younger sister and Andy’s mother, Marta Cano, 18-year-old Erik writes: “I tried to avoid Dad. It still happens, Andy, but for me it’s worse now… Every night I stay awake thinking he might come in… I’m scared… He’s crazy. He warned me a hundred times not to tell anyone, especially Lyle.”

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The brothers’ lawyers now hope that they will be sentenced to the time they have already served and released from prison. They are now 53 and 56 years old. Thanks to events like the #MeToo movement, Rand argues, our understanding of victims of abuse has changed drastically since the Menéndez siblings were first tried. Lyle’s prosecutor Pam Bozanich, for example, even argued in the 1990s that “men cannot be raped because they lack the necessary means to do so.”

“In 1993, after the first trial, I interviewed all the jurors,” Rand says. “All the women voted for manslaughter. All the men voted for murder. All the men said to me, ‘A father would never do that to his sons, would he?’ … I think we’ve evolved as a society in the last 30 years and are much more willing to accept that these things actually happen, not just to women, but to men as well.”

“Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story” will be released on Netflix on Thursday, September 19