Erik and Lyle Menendez are talking out concerning the 1989 murders of their mother and father — and what has occurred in the 35 years since — for the primary time in practically three many years in a brand new documentary.
“The Menendez Brothers” premiered on Netflix on Oct. 7, about two and a half weeks after one other sequence on the streaming platform, “Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story” catapulted the brothers' case into the general public eye in September.
The October documentary options snippets of greater than 20 hours of interviews, performed by way of telephone whereas they have been incarcerated at Richard J. Donovan Correctional Facility outdoors of San Diego.
“What happened that night, it is very well known. Over 30 years, I’ve processed so much of it,” Erik Menendez mentioned in the documentary. “Still have my heart beating talking about it. Still have nightmares.”
Erik and Lyle Menendez are each serving life sentences with out the opportunity of parole for the murders of their mother and father. The brothers shot and killed Jose and Kitty Menendez with shotguns in their lounge in Beverly Hills on Aug. 20, 1989.
“A part of Erik and I died on that night,” Lyle Menendez mentioned in the documentary.
Lyle and Erik Menendez, now 55 and 53, each shared why they determined to take part in the movie, greater than 35 years after the murders of Jose and Kitty Menendez.
“I’m getting older. I’m not going to live that much longer. So much hasn’t been told. And I think that not speaking out doesn’t help anyone,” Erik Menendez mentioned. “Those horrible events bonded us in a way that will never be broken.”
“Even with decades separated, we just felt bonded, almost like twins, we aren’t twins, but we felt like it. This happened because of family secrets and things from our past,” Lyle Menendez mentioned. “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.”
Here's what the brothers mentioned throughout the two-hour documentary, in their very own phrases — together with particulars concerning the night time of the murders, their two trials and life in jail.
On the night time of the murders
As recounted in the documentary, Lyle and Erik Menendez weren't instantly investigated as suspects after they known as 911 on the night time of Aug. 20, 1989 to report that that they had returned to their Beverly Hills, California, house to search out their mother and father lifeless with a number of gunshot wounds.
In the doc, Erik Menendez gave a number of causes as to why the police may have arrested him on the night time of the slayings.
“There should have been a police response, and we would have been arrested,” he mentioned. “We had no alibi. The gunpowder residue was all over our hands — under normal circumstances, they give you a gunpower residue test. We would have been arrested immediately.”
“There were shells, gun shells in my car. My car was inside the search area. All they had to do was search my car. They were searching everything,” he continued. “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.”
When a detective interviewed Erik Menendez round 4 a.m. the following morning, the then-18-year-old described what he witnessed when he discovered his mother and father.
“I told the detectives that I saw smoke, which would have been impossible if I didn’t do it,” he mentioned. “It’s pretty incredible we were not arrested that night. We should have been.”
On the occasions resulting in their arrest
Lyle Menendez addressed how he and his brother lived their lives in the times after their mother and father' deaths in the documentary.
“I didn’t really have normal coping mechanisms from childhood. I was comfortable with keeping secrets, but this was different than that,” he mentioned. “We were just in like, a fog of emotion.”
Erik Menendez mentioned how his prolonged relations coming into city and mourning their mother and father affected him.
“Seeing their heartbreak, and seeing them cry, and this compounding tragedy that just rippled out into every member of my family, and my family’s friends,” he mentioned. “It was as if everything had just turned to ash.”
The brothers described desirous to protect their household's legacy after the murders, and their aunts and uncles wanting them to rebuild their lives and discover construction rapidly.
But Erik and Lyle Menendez went on a spending spree in the months after their mother and father' deaths. Lyle Menendez purchased objects like a Porsche, a Rolex and 1000's of {dollars} value of clothes, and Erik Menendez bought a customized Jeep Wrangler.
Erik Menendez mentioned in the documentary the purchases have been only a entrance for his ache.
“The idea that I was having a good time is absurd,” he mentioned. “Everything was to cover up this horrible pain of not wanting to be alive. One of the things that kept me from killing myself was that … I felt like I would be a complete failure to my dad at that point.”
Lyle Menendez added: “I was not enjoying myself as a playboy. I was actually sobbing a lot at night, sleeping poorly, very distraught at times, and kind of adrift throughout all those months.”
It was their monetary habits that led investigators, in half, to zero in on Lyle and Erik Menendez as suspects. Almost seven months after the murders, authorities introduced on March 8, 1990, that Lyle and Erik Menendez had been charged with homicide.
“They could have just called me and told me to come into the police station,” Lyle Menendez recalled. “It was a staged arrest for a media circus. They had called the media to be ready, and they arrested me with a SWAT team cornering the car on the road like I was a fugitive drug dealer or something.”
Erik Menendez surrendered to authorities a number of days later after getting back from an abroad tennis event.
“From that moment when I got off the plane, and the detectives put handcuffs on me, everything changed,” he mentioned in the doc. “It was an ending of my life at that point. I was a teenager, and I had no idea of what was going to come.”
Erik Menendez recalled being afraid of telling his household, particularly his grandmother, that he and his brother have been chargeable for their mother and father' deaths.
Lyle Menendez mentioned he didn’t wish to destroy his father’s fame in the fallout of their arrests, and that he was “fearful that this was just going to spiral out of control.”
“My brother and I were very aware that our trial was never going to be about innocence,” he continued. “It just sort of was a forbearing of, OK, it’s going to be a media spectacle from the very beginning.”
On admitting to the murders
After discussing Jose Menendez arriving to the U.S. as a teenage Cuban immigrant, and later turning into a rich businessman and assembly his spouse, Kitty Menendez, the brothers started to clarify why they killed their mother and father.
“Two kids don't commit this crime for money,” Erik Menendez mentioned. “They're already going to get the money, they're the sole inheritors. They don't commit this crime for any reason other than something very, very wrong was happening in the family.”
Erik Menendez first admitted to killing their mother and father to his psychologist, Dr. Jerome Oziel, based on Oziel's courtroom testimony.
“I went to Dr. Oziel because I really wanted to kill myself,” Erik Menendez mentioned in the doc. “I told him I was responsible. His response was to have Lyle come in.”
In the documentary, Lyle Menendez recalled Oziel desirous to get their confessions recorded.
“He wanted one tape, in which at some point on tape, he told us, ‘You guys say you killed your parents,’” he mentioned. “It wasn’t like he was like, ‘Oh, this is terrible, let me help you guys and then we work through this in a confidential way.’ That’s what a normal therapist would do. Dr. Oziel was right into blackmail.”
During Oziel’s courtroom testimony, he said he recorded the tapes because he thought there was a strong threat to his life. He testified that Lyle Menendez asked his brother after their first session, “Now, how do we kill Oziel?”
Lyle Menendez denied making the threat in the documentary.
“No, I never threatened Dr. Oziel. I don’t go around threatening people. I had never had an act of violence in my life until my parents’ shootings,” he said.
Oziel declined to be interviewed for the documentary.
Oziel’s mistress, Judalon Smyth, tipped investigators off to Lyle and Erik Menendez’s involvement in the deaths of their parents after Oziel told her about his sessions with the brothers.
The use of Oziel's recordings was petitioned to the Supreme Court of California, and were not available as evidence until the end of the brothers' first trial, prosecutor Pamela Bozanich said in the documentary.
Three years before their first trial started, court hearings were still occurring on if Oziel could testify that Erik Menendez had confessed to him, or if the tapes could be introduced as evidence due to patient confidentiality, Lyle Menendez said in the doc.
On the morning of one of the hearings in 1990, sheriff’s deputies searched Erik and Lyle Menendez’s jail cells because the brothers allegedly tried to escape. They found a 17-page letter Lyle Menendez wrote to his brother in Erik Menendez’s cell.
At the end of the letter, Lyle wrote, “Please destroy.”
“Lyle wrote me this emotional letter when I was in the county jail. Lyle couldn’t express what he did in that letter, in person. It was easier for him to put it on paper. He felt that telling the sick secrets of the family would be like killing my parents, again. And he did not want to do it,” Erik Menendez said.
“Ultimately, it became clear, particularly after they found that jail letter, there was no way around saying what happened,” Lyle Menendez said. “Because they found that note, they had a confession that we were responsible for my parents’ deaths.”
Erik Menendez said that while he was supposed to destroy the letter, he thought the letter was “precious.”
“It was one of those moments where Lyle was really expressing his own pain, and I didn’t want to just throw it away, because that didn’t happen often between us.”
The sheriff’s department released a statement a few weeks later that the brothers had not tried to escape the jail.
Lyle Menendez described the discovery of the letter as “very tragic.”
“For me personally, that something that I was doing to try to keep a secret from coming out was the reason Erik, my brother, and (his brother’s attorney) Leslie, then said, ‘Well now you have to,’” he said. “Your obsession with keeping this thing secret caused you to write this thing the prosecution has got their hands on, and now you have to tell why.”
On speaking out about their father's abuse
Erik Menendez said that, before their first trial, his attorney Leslie Abramson said he had to get to an emotional space to be able to talk about what had happened to him.
She later enlisted additional experts to help her figure out why the crime occurred, including Dr. William Vicary.
The brothers said they were both hesitant to speak to the defense experts due to their experiences with Oziel.
“I would much rather lose the murder trial than talk about our past and what had happened,” Lyle Menendez said.
The brothers, as well as other family members interviewed in the documentary, recalled Jose Menendez’s intense parenting style when the boys were young.
“He loved us, but he believed that love needed to be earned,” Erik Menendez said. “So to be loved by him, we had to be worthy of that love, and often that meant going through pain.”
Dr. Ann Burgess, another defense expert who helped create the FBI's psychological profile for serial killers, said Erik Menendez told her he loved his parents and that 10 seconds after pulling the trigger, he regretted killing them.
“One of the misconceptions is that I did not love my father or love my mother,” Erik Menendez said. “That is the farthest thing from the truth. I miss my mother tremendously. I wish that I could go back and talk to her and give her a hug and tell her I love her, and I wanted her to love me and be happy with me, and be happy that I was her son and feel that joy and that connection. And I just want that.”
“It’s more difficult with my father,” he continued. “To me, as a boy, he was more than just a man. He was like the modern version of an ancient Greek God. He was different than any man I had ever met. And I simply idolized him. I wanted to be like him. But he was rarely a dad.”
On their first trial
The Menendez brothers' first trial began on July 20, 1993. Erik and Lyle Menendez were tried jointly with separate juries, one for each brother.
Both brothers testified in the case, and both alleged that their father, and at times their mother, had sexually abused them as young boys.
“I really didn’t want to testify,” Lyle Menendez said in the documentary, adding that it was his lawyer, Jill Lansing, who convinced him to take the stand.
“She preferred to have real reactions,” he said of his attorney, adding that she didn’t have him rehearse any of her questions. “And she just sort of drew the story out of me.”
Lansing declined to be interviewed for the documentary.
Lyle Menendez testified through tears that his father raped him between the ages of 6 and 8, and that he told his mother, and that she told him to stop exaggerating.
“His whole face was this pale, ashen, and he had this gray under his eyes,” Erik Menendez recalled of his brother’s testimony in the documentary. “The weight of his testimony, of having to really destroy the reputation of the family.”
Lyle Menendez also told jurors that at one point, he took his younger brother out into the woods and “played with him in the same way” that his father had, before starting to sob.
“I remember when he apologized to me on the stand for molesting me, that was a devastating moment for me,” Erik Menendez said. “He had never said he was sorry to me before.”
During Erik Menendez's testimony, he told jurors his father had sexually molested him for 12 years, from age 6 to the summer of the murders.
In addition to graphic details of his abuse, Erik Menendez told jurors that one time, when he told his father no, Jose Menendez left the room and returned with a knife.
Erik Menendez testified his father put the knife against his neck and threatened him, saying that he should kill him, and that the next time, he would.
While on the stand, Erik Menendez testified through tears that he believed the cause of the shooting was because he told his older brother about his father molesting him.
Erik Menendez said in the documentary that another factor was his father telling him he could not go to college out of town — which he said was his plan to get away from father's abuse — and that he would live at home while attending UCLA.
“I think it’s important to understand why that was so traumatic,” Erik Menendez said. “The belief that I would go to college, to get away from what was happening with my father was the most important thing in my life. It drove everything I did. So when it was taken from me, when my father told me no, that you are not getting away from me, it was up until that moment, the most devastating moment of my life.”
On the stand, Lyle Menendez testified that he confronted his father after his conversation with his younger brother. He told his father he would never touch his younger brother again, and if he did, he would call the police and the rest of the family.
Lyle Menendez testified that his father told him, “What I do with my son is none of your business, and we’re going to forget this conversation ever took place.”
After a confrontation between Lyle and Kitty Menendez, Erik Menendez recalled he and his brother “have been alone.”
“His demeanor changed — now it was clear to me that he was scared. Lyle, at this point, believed that our parents could kill us,” Erik Menendez said in the doc.
The brothers testified they purchased two shotguns the day before the shooting.
The day of the shooting, Lyle Menendez testified that he and Kitty Menendez got into an argument, and when Jose Menendez came in, he told Erik Menendez to go wait upstairs.
“When my dad gave me a direct order, I couldn’t mentally resist that order,” Erik Menendez said in the documentary.
When Jose Menendez left the room and went into the den, Lyle Menendez told jurors he thought his parents were going ahead with a plan to kill him and his brother.
“All I had in my head was if my mom and dad exit that room before I get there, I’m going to die,” Erik Menendez said in the documentary.
The brothers testified they loaded the guns with ammunition, walked through the doors to the living room, and started firing.
“I saw them shot and it was the most horrible, horrific sight I could ever, ever imagine,” Erik Menendez said during the documentary.
After the defense and prosecution rested their cases, the jury had to decide the brothers' fate, deciding whether to convict them of first-degree murder, second-degree murder or manslaughter, or to acquit them of the charges.
The jurors for both Erik and Lyle Menendez deliberated for over a month.
“There was a lot of anxiety,” Erik Menendez said in the doc. “I had no idea what the jury was thinking.”
Both juries were deadlocked, and on Jan. 28, 1994, Judge Stanley Weisberg declared a mistrial in the case.
“When they came back with that mistrial, hung jury, I imagined it meant that I had to do the trial all over again,” Erik Menendez said in the doc.
Lyle Menendez said: “It may as well not have happened, like, it was just crushing. I knew at that point, I was done. I was done.”
On their second trial
Then-Los Angeles County District Attorney Gil Garcetti vowed to attempt the Menendez brothers' case for a second time, and whereas awaiting the brand new trial, the brothers mentioned they noticed a shocking face on the county jail — O.J. Simpson, who had been arrested and charged with the homicide of his ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson, and her pal Ronald Goldman in the summer time of 1994.
“Probably the weirdest reconnection was obviously O.J. Simpson, because O.J. Simpson tossed a football around at my house and I met him when my father hired him,” Lyle Menendez mentioned in the doc. “And then met him again at his arrest at the county jail.”
Simpson was acquitted of the homicide fees in 1995, and Lyle Menendez described in the documentary how the general public backlash to the decision affected their case.
“I didn’t really think it would have the profound effect on the public that it did, in terms of just the backlash against high profile defendants,” he mentioned. “We got washed in the wake of that.”
The brothers’ second trial started days after Simpson’s acquittal, and Weisberg dominated that proof of Jose Menendez’s alleged abuse can be inadmissible in the brand new trial.
No cameras have been allowed, and lots of the household buddies, coaches and academics who testified in the primary trial have been unable to testify as a result of Lyle Menendez selected to not testify in the second trial.
“The torrent of public media ridicule made me kind of go back into a shell. The public never really heard from me again, and I did not testify,” Lyle Menendez mentioned in the doc.
Erik Menendez mentioned: “They hadn’t heard any of my family testify. None of the relatives, none of the evidence had been admitted. So it was just me cold up on the stand.”
Jurors weren't given the choice of discovering the brothers responsible of manslaughter in the second trial, which means they might resolve between first-degree homicide or acquittal.
After lower than every week of deliberations, the jury voted unanimously to convict each brothers of first-degree homicide.
“I remember when the verdict came down, it was first degree, and first degree meant spending the rest of my life in prison for the next 50, 60 years,” Erik Menendez mentioned. “It was so daunting that I was in shock.”
Lyle and Erik Menendez have been sentenced to life in jail with out the opportunity of parole in 1996.
On jail, appeals and life now
Following the decision and sentencing, the brothers taped an interview with ABC News' Barbara Walters.
Lyle Menendez mentioned he and his brother solely agreed to do the interview to attempt to plead that they get assigned to the identical jail to serve their sentences.
“At the time that we did that very unusual Barbara Walters interview together, we were still in county jail and the decision had not been made at all,” he mentioned. “So the only reason we did the interview was to try to plead that they not separate us and show how much we did not want that to happen.”
In the documentary, Erik Menendez recounted how he discovered he wouldn't be going to the identical jail as his brother.
“We thought we were going to go to the same prison. They put him in one van, and I didn’t understand why they were putting me in another van,” he mentioned. “I started screaming out to Lyle, and they shut the door. It was the last time I saw him.”
Erik Menendez recalled pondering he would by no means get to see his brother once more.
“We were put into maximum security prisons. These were very restrictive, violent prisons, where we were constantly in chains, shackles and handcuffed,” he defined. “I was on my own. I was afraid that I’d never be able to see him again.”
In 2005, a federal appeals court docket denied an enchantment from attorneys for Erik and Lyle Menendez, exhausting their appeals.
“When I had gotten the news that I would be denied the appeal, and now there was no hope of ever getting out, there was, you know, there was so much awfulness associated with the prospect that I may never see Lyle again,” Erik Menendez mentioned in the documentary. “My only brother, my only sibling, I may never be able to give him a hug again.”
Art grew to become an necessary outlet for Erik Menendez in jail, he mentioned.
“I took to it like someone who is thirsty takes to water. I saw it as this sort of spiritual, healing means to express myself,” he mentioned. “Sometimes I would paint for 12 hours a day. From morning to night, I would just be painting. I would be able to go away, in my mind, and lose myself.”
In 2018, the brothers have been moved and incarcerated in the identical jail.
“Two decades I feared that I could not protect him. I just felt no peace, like a part of me (was) just across the state. I fought for decades to be reunited with my brother,” Lyle Menendez mentioned. “It felt like it was finally a chance to heal, and it was starting on that day.”
“When suddenly this prayer of being able to see my brother again was being answered, the joy of seeing him again, of being able to wrap my arms around him and give him a hug was overwhelming,” Erik Menendez recalled. “It was just happiness.”
Lyle Menendez mentioned he will get to see his brother daily, and that they speak and are very shut.
“It took 21 years,” he mentioned. “It was really in large part because of the change in societal attitudes about the case and child sexual abuse of boys.”
“It’s kind of ironic that I would be the one who ended up devoting my life in prison to sex abuse survivor issues,” he added. “I would have never predicted any of that.”
The brothers mentioned the curiosity in their case, even after practically three many years since their conviction.
“When I finally came out, nobody wanted to believe me. It was a culture of silence and that culture of silence existed up until the 90s, and I think it finally got broken in the 2000s,” Erik Menendez mentioned.
Erik Menendez’s lawyer Leslie Abramson declined to be interviewed for the documentary, however she mentioned in an announcement: “Thirty years is a long time. I’d like to leave the past in the past. No amount of media, or teenage petitions, will alter the fate of these clients. Only the courts can do that, and they have ruled.”
The brothers emphasised they did not need the seriousness of their crime to be minimized or diminished.
“I went to the only person that had ever helped me, that had ever protected me, and then ultimately this happened because of me — because I went to him,” Erik Menendez mentioned. And then afterwards, let’s simply be sincere, he was arrested due to me. Because I informed Dr. Oziel. Because I couldn’t reside with what I did, I couldn’t reside with it. I wished to die.”
“In a way, I did not protect Lyle,” he continued. “I got him into every aspect of this tragedy. Every aspect of this tragedy is my fault.”
Attorneys for the brothers filed a habeas petition in 2023. The Los Angeles County District Attorney's workplace has been investigating the claims and is scheduled to file a response on Nov. 29, the workplace informed TODAY.com in September.
