Erik and Lyle Menendez are the closest they’ve been to freedom since they were convicted three decades ago of the shotgun murders of their parents, Jose and Mary Louise “Kitty” Menendez. But that freedom will have to continue to wait after a California parole board denied Erik’s request for release Thursday evening.
The panel will consider Lyle’s case tomorrow, Friday, Aug. 22. Thursday’s decision came almost 36 years to the day after the brothers killed their parents in the living room of their Spanish-style mansion in Beverly Hills, California.
Lyle, who was 21, and Erik, then 18, had planned an alibi of watching “Batman” at the cinema, and staged the crime scene to look like Mafia killings. Afterward, they threw their shotguns off a cliff on Mulholland Drive, according to court documents.
As fixtures of the American public’s obsession with true crime, the Menendez brothers ignited frenzy and fandom on more than one occasion. For this week’s hearings, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation enforced a strict media blackout, with only one Los Angeles Times reporter allowed to observe and file pool reports afterward.
Officials arranged for both brothers to argue their cases remotely from the Richard J. Donovan Correctional Facility in San Diego, where both are incarcerated. They contend they no longer pose a threat to public safety and will not commit additional crimes.
Los Angeles District Attorney Nathan Hochman fought the brothers’ request for release.
“The Menendez brothers have never fully accepted responsibility for the horrific murders of their parents, instead continuing to promote a false narrative of self-defense that was rejected by the jury decades ago,” Hochman said in a statement on Wednesday. “We have consistently opposed their release because they have not demonstrated full insight into their crimes or shown that they have been fully rehabilitated, and therefore continue to pose a risk to society. We will evaluate our final position based on the evidence presented at the hearing.”
The background
Before the Menendez brothers killed their parents on Aug. 20, 1989, their family seemed to epitomize the American Dream. It was a rags-to-riches story in which Jose, born in Cuba, worked his way up through the ranks to become chief operating officer of RCA Records.
“His two handsome, athletic sons had every opportunity money could buy,” Brenna Ehrlich wrote for Rolling Stone magazine in 2017, “yet in the end, they took their parents’ lives in a spectacular display of brutality and greed. There was alleged incest and abuse, with millions at stake. It was the kind of story only Bret Easton Ellis could write – only it wasn’t fiction.”
It took months for the arrests. The brothers were shocked they weren’t caught the day of the murders.
“There were shells, gun shells in my car,” Erik said in the Netflix documentary The Menendez Brothers, released last year. “My car was inside the search area. All they had to do was search my car. They were searching everything. 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. I was shell-shocked.”
It wasn’t until Lyle told a therapist about the killings that the brothers’ involvement came to light. Lyle was arrested in March 1990, and Erik turned himself in days later.
Both faced charges of first degree murder.
Media frenzy
The brothers’ trial in 1993 ignited a media frenzy that presaged the spectacle surrounding O.J. Simpson’s murder trial two years later. The day-to-day proceedings broadcast on Court TV made history.
“It turned real-life tragedy into live entertainment, and foreshadowed our current fascination with true-crime docuseries and reality TV,” Ehrlich wrote.
America stood by to watch, enrapt.
“I’d never seen anything like the Menendez trial. It was my first media circus,” former ABC News correspondent Terry Moran, who covered the trial, wrote in 2017. “The way the catastrophe of the Menendez family emerged gradually, day after day, in the testimony and evidence in the trial, the monstrous portrait of a family’s secrets, lies, and broken dreams slowly coming into horrible focus. It was hard to watch. … They were transformed. So were their parents. Their family tragedy became a kind of national game-show or cartoon — unreal, drained of the pain that flowed through the courtroom every day.”
Separate juries tried each brother, with prosecutors arguing they killed their parents for money. Defense attorneys argued that the brothers killed in self defense after years of sexual and emotional abuse from their father.
Both juries deadlocked in 1994, leading to mistrials.
The brothers went before a jury together in a 1996 retrial. This time, the judge limited the amount of testimony and other evidence the brothers could present about their father’s sexual abuse, and the jury convicted both of first-degree murder.
They were sentenced to life without the possibility of parole and have been in prison ever since.
Appeals and new evidence
The brothers attempted multiple appeals in the late 1990s and early 2000s, but all were denied.
The case remained dormant until 2023, when new evidence surfaced from a member of the Latino pop boy band, Menuto. Roy Rosselló said Jose Menendez raped him around 1983, when he was 14 years old.
“I was in terrible pain for a week,” Rosselló said in 2023.
Additional evidence came from a letter Erik Menendez wrote to a cousin, detailing sexual abuse by his father.
In 2024, the Los Angeles County district attorney reviewed the new evidence, then petitioned the court for a resentencing.
Renewed public interest
Just as the first trial had garnered media attention, the brothers attracted fans amid renewed hype surrounding their parricide case.
Ryan Murphy’s slick Emmy-nominated series, “Monsters: The Lyle and Eric Menendez Story,” debuted on Netflix last year. People who weren’t born yet at the time of the murders began sharing their thoughts about the case on social media.
Meanwhile, family members came forward to support the brothers. The family members contended the jurors who returned guilty verdicts in 1996 were of an era that couldn’t hear boys could be raped by their father.
“As their aunt, I had no idea of the extent of the abuse they suffered at the hands of my brother-in-law,” Kitty Menendez’s sister Joan Vandermolen, 93, said at a news conference. “None of us did. But looking back I can see the fear their father instilled in them… The truth is, Lyle and Erik were failed by the very people who should have protected them. By their parents, by the system, by society at large. When they stood trial, the world was not ready to believe boys could be raped or that young men could be victims of sexual violence.”
“Today we know better,” their aunt continued. “No jury today would issue such a harsh sentence without taking their trauma into account. Lyle and Erik paid a heavy price — discarded by a system that failed to recognize their pain. They have grown, they have changed, and they have become better men despite everything they have been through.”
A new DA, a new stance on the case
After Hochman defeated George Gascón to become district attorney last year, he attempted to withdraw Gascón’s petition seeking the brothers’ resentencing. Hochman has cast doubt on their claims of sexual abuse and suggested they have not shown remorse.
In May, however, a Los Angeles County Superior Court judge reduced the sentences from life without parole to 50 years to life, making them immediately eligible for parole because they committed the crime when they were younger than 26.
Newsom ordered the state parole board to study if the brothers have been rehabilitated.
Hochman has remained unconvinced that the brothers should ever leave prison.
“While recent documentaries and films have drawn renewed attention to this case, parole decisions must be based solely on the facts and the law,” Hochman said Wednesday. “This case, like all cases — especially those that captivate the public — must be viewed with a critical eye. Justice should never be swayed by spectacle. My personal opinions are irrelevant. What matters and what guides my office is the evidence, the facts of the case, and the application of the law.”
