On the night of Aug. 20, 1989, Jose and Kitty Menendez were watching television in the den of their Beverly Hills mansion when their two sons , Lyle and Erik, entered the room with 12-gauge shotguns. Law enforcement sources told the Los Angeles Times that Jose had the barrel of a gun shoved into his mouth after he had already been shot four times, with a final shot blowing off the back of his head. Kitty, who was shot 10 times, tried to crawl away as the 18- and 21-year-olds reloaded the gun, but was killed by a shot to the cheek. Hours later, older brother Lyle called 911, sobbing to the operator, “Someone killed my parents !”
Now, 35 years later, the infamous murders are the subject of a new Ryan Murphy drama on Netflix , Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story . Actors Javier Bardem and Chloë Sevigny play the parents, while Nicholas Chávez and Cooper Koch portray Lyle and Erik, respectively. It’s the second season of Murphy’s controversial true crime saga , the first run of which reignited interest in “Milwaukee cannibal” Jeffrey Dahmer . Titled Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story and starring Evan Peters as the bespectacled serial killer, the series went stratospheric, clocking in at 1 billion hours of views in its first 60 days and sparking widespread debate about the “idealization” of killers . This time, though, things are different. This time, the “monsters” might just be the victims .
During the brothers’ trials from 1993 to 1996, Lyle and Erik claimed they had suffered a lifetime of abuse at the hands of their father, a millionaire Hollywood showbiz executive . The defense argued that the couple should be tried for manslaughter , not murder , and claimed that Jose 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 arrival of the long-awaited new Netflix series, new evidence emerged that could set them free.
Two months after the murders occurred, Robert Rand, a Miami Herald reporter who perhaps knows the case better than anyone, traveled to Los Angeles to interview the Menendez family . At the time, the brothers had not yet been arrested and it was widely believed that the mob was responsible for the deaths of Jose and Kitty because of Jose’s fame as a wealthy movie industry executive.
“I spent three days with Erik and Lyle. The public didn’t consider them suspects. I had absolutely no reason to suspect them,” Rand tells me now. “They told me very loving, emotional stories about how close their family was.” What Rand didn’t know was that it would be the first of many times he would meet with the brothers over the next three and a half decades for an account 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 reissued with a new afterword that reveals crucial information uncovered over the past six years.
The brothers had claimed that on the day of the murders they had gone to the movies to see Batman . In reality, they had dumped the guns somewhere on Mulholland Drive, then driven to a theater and bought tickets for a movie they didn’t see, then returned home to the scene of the crime. During the 1989 interview, Erik made a chilling comment to Rand: “I’ve never seen anything like it, I’ll never see anything like it. They looked like wax. I’d never seen my father defenseless, and it’s sad to think that one day he would be.”
In the trailer for Murphy’s new series (no episodes were seen by reporters before the show’s premiere), Erik and Lyle are seen spending lavishly in the wake of their parents’ deaths. In fact, 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**t” his father had given him, as well as $40,000 worth of clothing and a $15,000 Rolex watch. Among his more outlandish purchases was a $300,000 down payment on a chicken wing restaurant in Princeton, New Jersey, where he had attended college.
Eventually, Erik confessed to the murders to his psychologist, Jerome Oziel. Lyle became 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 boys talking, I started to believe,” he assured investigative journalist Dominic Dunne (played by Nathan Lane in Monsters ) in 1990. After a messy breakup with Oziel, it was Smyth who alerted police to the existence of recordings of therapy sessions in which the Menendez brothers admitted to the murders of their parents.
After their arrest in March 1990, it was three years before Lyle and Erik were able to testify, as lawyers debated whether using the tapes as evidence violated doctor-patient privilege. The trial attracted international attention, as it was broadcast on Court TV. “You have to remember that in the 1990s there was no Internet or social media,” Rand tells me. “So once the mainstream media got a handle on the profile or details of the case — rich, greedy kids killing their parents — it was all over. And it was very difficult for the defense to fight back.”
The brothers admitted killing their parents but claimed they did so out of fear, particularly of their father, whom they described as a violent pedophile. The defense called several family members as evidence. Brian Andersen, a cousin of Lyle and Erik, said Jose made the boys shower with him after tennis practice. He testified to the jury: “As soon as Jose took one of the boys into his room, the door would be locked, and Kitty would make it clear that they were not to walk down the hall.” 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 he and his father had been “touching each other down there,” specifying that she was referring to his genital area.
Prosecutors, however, argued that even if Lyle and Erik had been abused, it did not give them the right to kill. They pointed to the counseling confession, during which they did not mention self-defense or fear for their lives. The brothers were retried and found guilty after a first trial was overturned by jury indecision. Both were convicted of two counts of premeditated murder and sentenced to life in prison. “Eric and Lyle Menendez have been incarcerated for 34 years and six months, and I believe they are in prison for killing their longtime abusers,” Rand says. “The correct verdict for the Menendez brothers’ trial should have been manslaughter, not murder.”
Over the past three decades, Rand has conducted countless interviews with members of the Menendez family and those close to Jose. Last year, another alleged victim of Jose’s abuse broke his silence. In the 2023 Peacock docuseries Menendez + Menudo: Boys Betrayed (co-produced by Rand), Roy Rosselló, formerly of the successful Puerto Rican boy band Menudo, claims that Jose drugged and raped him as a teenager. At the time, Jose was the head of RCA Records. “We believe Roy was ‘gifted’ to Jose Menendez after Jose signed Menudo to a $30 million contract,” Rand tells me. In the documentary, Erik tells Rand from prison, “I always hoped and believed that one day the truth about my father would come out. But I never wished for it to come out like this — the result of trauma another child suffered.”
The day after the documentary premiered, the Menendez brothers’ appellate attorneys 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 received from Jose’s younger sister and Andy’s mother, Marta Cano, Erik, 18, writes: “I’ve been trying to avoid Dad. It keeps happening, Andy, but it’s worse for me now […] Every night I lie awake thinking he might come […] I’m scared […] He’s crazy. He’s warned me hundreds of times not to tell anyone, least of all Lyle.”
The brothers’ lawyers are now hoping to have their sentences adjusted to take into account the time they had already served and to be released from prison. They are now 53 and 56. Thanks to events like the #MeToo movement , Rand says there has been a dramatic shift in the way abuse victims are viewed since the Menendez brothers were first tried. For example, the prosecutor who prosecuted Lyle, Pam Bozanich, went so far as to say in the 1990s that “men could not be raped because they lack the equipment to be raped.”
“In 1993, I interviewed all the jurors after the first trial,” Rand recounts. “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 children, right?’ […] I think we’ve evolved as a society in the last 30 years and are much more willing to accept that these things happen, not just to women, but to men as well.”
Monsters: The Story of Lyle and Erik Menendez arrives on Netflix on Thursday, September 19
