Your support helps us to tell the story
This election is still a dead heat, according to most polls. In a fight with such wafer-thin margins, we need reporters on the ground talking to the people Trump and Harris are courting. Your support allows us to keep sending journalists to the story.
The Independent is trusted by 27 million Americans from across the entire political spectrum every month. Unlike many other quality news outlets, we choose not to lock you out of our reporting and analysis with paywalls. But quality journalism must still be paid for.
Help us keep bring these critical stories to light. Your support makes all the difference.
Thirty-five years after murdering his parents, Erik Menendez has revealed what he’d say to his mom, Mary Louise Menendez, otherwise known as Kitty.
In the new Netflix documentary, Menendez Brothers, which tells the story of the 1989 murder of Kitty and Jose Menendez from the perspective of Erik and his brother Lyle, the 53-year-old expressed his desire to speak to his mom one more time.
“I miss my mother tremendously,” Erik said.
The prisoner said it was a misconception that he and Lyle did not love their mother. “That is the farthest thing from the truth,” he said.
“I wish that I could go back and talk to her,” he said of his mother. “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.”
With his dad, the man both brothers claim sexually assaulted them continuously throughout their lives, Erik’s approach would be quite different. In fact, his alleged relationship with José makes it more “difficult” to think about what he’d say to him now.
“To me as a boy, he was more than just a man. He was like the modern version of an ancient Greek god,” Erik explained. “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.
“He loved us. But he believed that love needed to be earned,” he continued. “So, to be loved by him we had to be worthy of that love and often that meant going through pain.”
The Netflix documentary comes after Ryan Murphy’s dramatic adaptation of José and Kitty’s murder, Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story, aired mid-September.
Unlike Murphy’s fictional retelling of the storied 1989 killings, the documentary takes viewers inside the minds of Lyle and Erik behind bars at Richard J Donovan Correctional Facility as new discoveries are made in their case that could potentially set them free.
Throughout their two trials, which happened over the course of seven years, both Menendez brothers claimed they killed their father and mother out of fear and “imperfect self-defense.” However, they were ultimately both convicted of two counts of first-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison.
