The Menendez Brothers: Will They Go Free?

The jailhouse calls, some 20 hours worth, came in 15-minute increments from the Richard J. Donovan Correctional Facility in San Diego, Calif. Lyle and Erik Menendez, now serving life sentences without parole for murdering their wealthy parents in 1989, purportedly to inherit the family fortune, come across as polite middle-aged men as they explain their motive to the director of a new Netflix documentary. 

Among their claims: they acted after a lifetime of sexual and physical abuse at the hands of their controlling father and as a result of their mother’s determined silence and refusal to put a stop to it.

“Two kids don’t commit this crime for money—they’re already going to get the money,” says Erik, 53. “They don’t commit this crime for any reason other than something very, very wrong was happening in the family.” 

Lyle, 56, who has rarely spoken to the media, adds hopefully, “It’s been 34 years of incarceration and, for the first time, I feel like it’s a conversation where people now can understand and believe.”

Times have undoubtedly changed since the Menendez brothers — whose story has been told on dozens of news and true crime shows, including the Ryan Murphy-produced Netflix dramatic series Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story — were convicted on March 20, 1996, of first-degree murder in the deaths of Jose and Kitty Menendez. 

With the release of the latest addition to the catalog —The Menendez Brothers, a documentary now streaming on Netflix — the brothers hope that after the Me Too movement and with greater public awareness of the effects of sex crimes against men and boys, audiences will be more open to understanding why they killed their parents. 

Decades Later, New Evidence in the Case

“They’ve had a lot of time to think about what happened that night, and both of them think what they did was not right,” says the film’s director, Alejandro Hartmann, who spoke to the brothers over five months between 2022 and 2023. “But they always say, especially Lyle, that if the case were tried again today, maybe it would be different for them.” 

And they may yet have a chance to find out: In May 2023, lawyers for Erik and Lyle filed a habeas corpus petition—their first appeal in more than two decades—requesting that their convictions be overturned on the basis of new evidence. 

The petition includes a letter Erik purportedly wrote in 1988 to his cousin, Andy Cano, that discusses Jose’s ongoing molestation of his youngest son. “I don’t know I’ll make it through this,” Erik wrote in the letter, eight months before the murders. Additionally, the petition refers to a 2023 affidavit filed by singer Roy Rosselló, 55, a one-time member of Menudo, who claimed he was raped by Jose when he was a young teen at a time when the elder Menendez headed the boy band’s record label and suggesting Jose’s sons weren’t his only victims.

While the request is being weighed by the Los Angeles District Attorney’s office, who will offer the judge a non-binding “formal opinion” on Nov. 26, one of the brothers’ attorneys, Mark Geragos, says he’s “cautiously optimistic” they will be released from prison.

Double Homicide, Night of Aug. 20, 1989

“Someone killed my parents,” Lyle told the 911 dispatcher at 11:47 p.m. on Aug. 20, 1989.

About two hours earlier that Sunday night, Lyle, then 21,  and Erik, 18, had burst into the TV room of the family’s $4 million Beverly Hills mansion and gunned down Jose, 45, an executive at RCA Records, and his former beauty queen wife, Kitty, 47, as they snacked on berries and cream. 

In The Menendez Brothers, Erik says police arrived on the scene quickly but didn’t seem to consider the brothers suspects. “There should have been a police response,” he says. “We had no alibi. The gunpowder residue was all over our hands. There were shells, gun shells in my car. And if they had just pressed me, I wouldn’t have been able to withstand any questioning. I was in a completely broken and shattered state of mind. It’s incredible we were not arrested that night.”

It was only after the surviving sons went on a $700,000 shopping spree with their parents’ life insurance payout—buying a Porsche Carrera, a Jeep Wrangler, three Rolex watches and a restaurant in Princeton, N.J., where Lyle had attended Princeton University before getting kicked out for plagiarism—that investigators began to eye them with suspicion. 

After a former girlfriend of Erik’s psychiatrist told police that the brothers had both confessed to the killings in recorded therapy sessions, authorities arrested them in March 1990, accusing them of first-degree murders motivated by greed.  

In reality, Lyle and Erik say in the new doc, they immediately regretted the killings—and felt lost and depressed in a world without the parents who had strictly guided them. “The idea that I was having a good time is absurd,” says Erik. “Everything was to cover up this horrible pain of not wanting to be alive.”

Inside the High Profile Trials: 1993 & 1995

During the Menendezes’ six-month marathon murder trial starting in 1993, jurors heard from dozens of friends, coaches and family members about Jose’s cruel and abusive behavior towards his sons. “People said [my father] is the most intimidating, worst human I’ve met in my whole life,” says Lyle.

Adds Erik: “He loved us, but he believed that love needed to be earned. And often that meant going through pain.” 

The brothers also gave gut-wrenching testimony about being raped and molested by their father—Lyle between the ages of 6 and 8, and Erik from 6 to 18. 

Erik sobbed while recalling how he once refused his father’s sexual demands. Jose “came back with a knife,” he recalled, and put it to his son’s neck, saying, “I should kill you, and next time I will.” 

In the end, jurors deadlocked over a verdict, and a mistrial was declared. 

The brothers were tried again the following year, and, with the judge’s decision to withhold much of the testimony about sexual abuse from the jurors, they were convicted of murder and sentenced to two consecutive terms of life in prison. 

Incarcerated in separate California prisons for 21 years, the brothers say they felt deprived of the one source of comfort and understanding in their lives—each other. 

“[He was] the only person that had ever helped me, that had ever protected me,” says younger brother Erik.

After years of legal negotiations, the Menendezes were reunited in 2018 in the same cell block of a correctional facility in San Diego. 

“Even with decades separated we just felt bonded. We’re not twins but we felt like it,” says Lyle in the doc. “It was finally a chance to heal.”

Now the brothers see each other every day, according to doc director Hartmann. “Lyle is involved in projects to make the living conditions of inmates better—to bring some green to the prison or to bring in pets.” 

Erik, who meditates, is “more focused on his spirituality,” says Hartmann. And while both brothers work with their lawyers to advance their latest petition to overturn their convictions, they prefer not to discuss their chances of walking free one day. “Erik doesn’t want to talk about that—he doesn’t want to have false expectations.”

With additional reporting by K.C. Baker and Christine Pelisek