The true crime drama “Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story” has been one of the most viewed series on Netflix since its Sept. 19 debut, driving enormous interest once again in the Menendez brothers, who in 1989 murdered their parents with shotguns inside the family’s Beverly Hills mansion.
On Monday, the same streaming platform released “The Menendez Brothers,” a feature-length documentary by Alejandro Hartmann, which draws from 20 hours of new phone interviews with the brothers from prison. It also includes on-camera interviews with surviving family members, journalists, the first prosecuting attorney and several jurors from the two criminal trials of the 1990s.
After a sensational trial that ended in hung juries in 1994 (the brothers had separate juries), Lyle and Erik were retried and convicted in 1996, sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. For the second trial, Judge Stanley Weisberg had barred the defense from using most of the testimony supporting its argument that the brothers had killed their parents out of fear, following years of sexual, emotional and physical abuse.
The case has become something of a cause celebre in recent years, with celebrities and young social media users advocating the brothers’ release, particularly as new evidence has emerged appearing to support the brothers’ abuse claims.
At the same time, a flurry of books, documentaries and scripted series have taken a more sympathetic view toward the brothers than they originally received; this latest documentary comes just days after George Gascón, the Los Angeles district attorney, announced his office was revisiting the case, saying, “We have a moral and ethical obligation to review what is being presented to us.”
Much of the documentary retreads ground from earlier treatments and relies heavily on archival footage, particularly from the first trial, which was broadcast on Court TV. Still, several new, less-familiar and long-forgotten details stand out. Here’s a roundup.
The week before the murders
Although some of it was recounted in court, Lyle and Erik, now 56 and 53, share more in the new interviews about the fear and desperation they felt just ahead of the murders.
As he says in the documentary, Erik had been looking forward to graduating high school and going to Stanford so that he could get away from his father, Jose. After his father told him he couldn’t go to Stanford — and would instead have to live at home and attend U.C.L.A. — Erik was suicidal. That, he says, was when he revealed to Lyle that their father was still sexually abusing him. “It was the most devastating moment of my life,” he says.
Lyle, who had also been abused, describes confronting his father about the abuse and finding out indirectly that this mother, Kitty, knew all about it.
Erik says that this was the first time he sensed that Lyle was truly scared; they sincerely believed, he says, that Jose and Kitty were going to kill them.
Lyle’s and Erik’s mental health after the murders
The brother’s behavior after the murders — which included a lavish spending spree — was cited by the prosecution as proof that they had killed their parents for money.
In the documentary, both brothers say they were far from happy or carefree after the murders. Lyle says he was sobbing at night, sleeping poorly and feeling generally adrift.
Erik says, “The idea that I was having a good time was absurd,” adding later that he still missed his mother tremendously and wished he could talk with her.
He also calls it “remarkable,” given the preponderance of overlooked evidence against them, that he and Lyle were not arrested right away.
Their life in prison
After their conviction, the bothers’ top concern was that they not be sent to different state prisons. In the documentary, Lyle says the only reason they agreed to a Barbara Walters interview in 1996 was to plead publicly to stay together. They were separated anyway.
“Our start to prison life was tremendously painful” because of that separation, Lyle says. Erik went on a hunger strike at the time.
The two were reunited when Lyle was transferred in 2018 to a prison in San Diego, where Erik was being held. They now are able to talk to each other every day.
Lyle says he has been able to find a sort of “mental freedom” over the years, taking on what he calls a “father confessor” role for other abuse victims in prison. Erik has taken to painting, describing it as “a spiritual or healing means to express myself.” He sometimes paints 12 hours a day.
The prosecution stands firm
“The only reason we’re doing this special is because of the TikTok movement,” Pamela Bozanich, who prosecuted the first trial, says in the documentary. Instead of holding criminal trials, she suggests ironically, why not just take polls on social media?
Time does not appear to have altered her opinions about the case.
“I’m telling you now, that whole defense was fabricated,” she says, adding: “And if I were an immoral person, I would have fabricated it much the same way.”
Erik’s original defense lawyer, Leslie Abramson, declined to be interviewed for the documentary. She wrote in an email to producers, “I’d like to leave the past in the past.”
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