On a warm Beverly Hills evening in August 1989, two brothers entered their own home carrying shotguns and killed their parents José and Mary Louise ‘Kitty’ Menéndez.
Kitty was shot 10 times, while José was shot six. After the murders, the brothers didn’t flee, and instead waited for the police to show up, calling 911, with Lyle screaming, "Someone killed my parents."
When law enforcement arrived, Lyle and Erik Menéndez said that they had been watching Batman at the movies and had found their parents in this terrible state.
The police believed them – after all, why would the two sons of the wealthy corporate executive, who seemingly had it all, want to hurt their parents?
Now the story behind the shocking case – and the investigation that led to the brothers’ arrest – is becoming the subject of the second series of Netflix’s chart-topping true crime series, Monsters.
The first chapter was released in 2022 and focused on the story of American serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer. It became Netflix’s third most popular English-language series of all time – so expectation and excitement is sky-high for the new series, which stars Javier Bardem and Chloë Sevigny.
Here’s the true story behind Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story
José Enrique Menéndez (who’ll be played by Bardem) was born in Cuba in 1944, and moved to the US after the Cuban revolution. By 1963, he had met and married Mary Louise "Kitty" Andersen (Chloë Sevigny). The two travelled for Menéndez’s work, first to New York, then New Jersey, then Beverly Hills.
On the surface they were the perfect family: they had two sons, Lyle and Erik (played in the show by Cooper Koch and Nicholas Chavez), and Menéndez started doing well at work – over time, the family would become incredibly wealthy, amassing a fortune of around $14 million by the time of Menéndez’s death.
But behind closed doors, the family was far from perfect: by 1976, eight-year-old Lyle told his cousin Diane Vander Molen that he was being sexually abused by his father. Molen told Kitty, who took her husband’s side.
This was a pattern that continued throughout the children’s lives: during the brothers’ trial they said that they had killed their parents out of self-defence after years of emotional and physical abuse. According to CBS, while Lyle said his father had never touched him after he was eight, Erik said he had been molested all throughout his teenage years.
The violence and unhappiness that reportedly took place inside the Menéndez house was corroborated by some witnesses during the trial: Alan Andersen, Lyle and Erik's cousin, who was called to the trial said of José: “Hitting the kids with the belt, never had a problem with that. And Kitty. She wouldn't get up to console the children, nothing.”
Yet on the outside, the family was the envy of colleagues, school friends and acquaintances. Lyle would attended Princeton University (though he struggled with work and was eventually suspended for plagiarism) while Erik entered the 1989 Boys' Junior National Tennis Championship, reaching the second qualifying round.
Over time a plan started to hatch in the minds of Lyle, 21, and Erik, 19, which came to fruition on the evening of August 20, 1989 when they killed their own parents.
And perhaps they could have escaped arrest, too. But in the months after the shocking deaths, the brothers did not act in a way that might be expected of mourning sons. They went travelling to Israel, London and the Caribbean, Erik hired a full-time tennis coach, and they began spending extravagantly – Lyle bought a restaurant in Princeton, and Porsche and a Rolex.
It obviously raised the suspicions of the police who were investigating the case – the brothers were, after all, highlighting a very clear motive they might have for harming their parents.
The police finally managed to elicit a confession from Erik – after a failed attempt that included putting a wire on a pal, Craig Cignarelli – via his psychologist Jerome Oziel. The brothers were both arrested in March 1990.
The shocking case became a national scandal during its 1993 trial, when it was broadcast on Court TV. The brothers put forward a case which explained their actions as self-defence after years of abuse from their parents, particularly their father. They accused him of being a perfectionist and a paedophile. The prosecution argued that their real motives had been financial. Two family members corroborated the brothers’ sexual allegations against their parents.
The defence didn’t wash, and Lyle and Erik were both sentenced to life in prison, convicted of first-degree murder and conspiracy to murder. There were dozens of complications which took years to be resolved, and the brothers pushed for a mistrial. But, eventually, in July 1996 they were sentenced to life in prison once and for all.
When finally incarcerated, it would be 22 years before Lyle and Erik saw each other again: "I burst into tears. I had to walk a long way to see him... when he got brought over in a van, I was able to see him coming off and meet with him and I wasn't sure how I would react," said Lyle in 2018 – the same year Lyle and Erik were moved into the same unit 2018.
“I don't know that I really ever recovered from [the separation]," said Lyle to Daily Mail TV. "It's like a healing of a wound to be reunited. It's been 25 years since the trials, I think that's long enough."
In 2023 the brothers filed a motion asking for a new hearing after former boy band member Roy Rosselló alleged in a documentary that he too had been raped by José Menéndez as a child.
“We have received the habeas petition in the Menendez matter and it’s currently under review,” The Los Angeles County District Attorney’s office told CNN in May last year. A habeas petition looks into the legality of someone’s imprisonment.
