Imagine living in a mansion in Beverly Hills, having a good relationship with your brother, being close with your parents, doing a sport that you love and being able to go on insane vacations. You have everything you could ever want. Right? Well that’s what everyone thought about Lyle and Erik Menendez. And that’s definitely what it looked like on the outside. But something very dark was happening on the inside of those mansion walls.
On Aug. 20, 1989 their parents Jose and Mary Louise “Kitty” Menendez were shot and killed by their two sons. And on Sept. 17, 2024 “Monsters,” a Netflix series by Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan came out to peel back the layers of the gruesome case.
On Aug. 20, 1989 Jose and Kitty were watching TV in their family room, relaxing after a long day. Meanwhile, Lyle and Erik were sneaking around outside with shotguns. And on that same night, Jose and Kitty Menendez were shot and killed. A night that would go down in history.
After this they went out on the town to try and create an alibi for themselves. They came back to the house around two hours later and that’s when Lyle made the 911 call, screaming to the police that someone killed his parents.
Erik and Lyle then flew under the radar. They began going on vacations, buying new things and thinking they were safe. All until Erik goes to his therapist, Jerome Oziel, crying and saying how he is having nightmares of that night. He says he is suicidal. He then starts to sob and admits to the murder of his parents.
Eventually, it gets to the police about what really happened that night by Oziel’s mistress, Judalon Smyth. And the top new suspects to this murder are now Erik and Lyle. The two horrible brothers, the two insane brothers. The two cold blooded killers. Right? This is how it’s portrayed in “Monsters,” at least.
Ever since this series came out it has gotten a lot of attention from media platforms such as Instagram, Twitter, Tik Tok and more. A lot of viewers have been saying “Monsters” has a harsh portal on the horrid realities of this case. And with the rise of social media, people have really been able to bring this case back to life.
People are upset because in a lot of scenes the show focuses on how Erik and Lyle are just spoiled rich kids with a weird sexual relationship instead of how they were mentally and sexually abused by their mother and father for years. It highlights the wrong parts of the story. Another example is the show has scenes of Lyle using cocaine. This is based on Dominick Dunne, who was a Vanity Fair journalist. He had theories of this, but never had concrete proof.
During the time of the actual case, a lot of people did view them the way the shows say they are. A lot of people speculated that the boys killed their parents for their $14 million dollar estate. This was because very little evidence was found that showed the jury Erik and Lyle were abused. A lot of people just thought they were saying that to get out of jail. But in more recent years new evidence has come out proving that Jose Menendez did sexually abuse them.
Erik wrote a letter to his cousin eight months before he and Lyle murdered their parents. The letter is about how Erik feels very alone in his house since Lyle moved out. Erik says how he is scared of his dad, he never knows when it will happen again and he’s scared to go to sleep at night because he’s in fear his father will come into his room.
The letter isn’t the only thing that has resurfaced. Recently Roy Rossello, who was in Menudo, the popular Puerto Rican boy band, worked closely with Jose Menendez, who was an executive at RCA records. And he has signed a sworn affidavit that Jose Menendez raped him when he was 15 years old. He signed this in 2023. He says that Jose took him back to his house, Rossello had a glass of wine and felt like he didn’t have control over his body, and Jose took Rossello into a room and raped him.
The letter was found only recently in 2023 and Rosello only came out and talked about the abuse, also in 2023. These pieces of evidence weren’t around when the boys were first on trial. But now it is causing judges to rethink the case, and maybe give the boys a second trial. In an article from Biography, Colin McEvoy and Tyler Piccotti write that “staff within the district attorney’s office said a court hearing about the resentencing could happen within 30 to 45 days.”
With this new evidence that has surfaced a new trial for the brothers is definitely in the works. The article that McEvoy and Piccotti wrote for Biography was published on Oct. 24, 2024 and a new abcNEWS article written by T.Michelle Murphy says that “currently, the next court date for the Menendez brothers is scheduled for Nov. 26, 2024.” LA District Attorney George Gascon has put this whole retrial possibility in action and said in this article that he will make a firm decision on the case in the next 10 days. He said that in late October, and there have been no updates, but there will be very soon.
In a recent news update on Nov. 25, a judge pushed back the resentencing hearing to “late January.”
Even though it has been years since their first trials, who knows, maybe they could finally be free. For the first time in their lives.
