So many people visit the Hermès store in Beverly Hills that there’s crowd control out front, but for followers of all things Erik and Lyle Menendez, 722 North Elm Drive is the ultimate destination. For less than the price of a few movie tickets, a guide will chauffeur them to the Mediterranean-style mansion where the infamous brothers murdered their parents with multiple shotgun blasts at close range. Ever since Netflix’s Monsters: The Erik and Lyle Menendez Story debuted in September, hordes have reportedly been snapping pictures and blasting Milli Vanilli’s “Blame It on the Rain,” which was featured in the hit series, out their car windows, exasperating neighbors. All this has become a pilgrimage of sorts: Some of the tourists fly in from as far away as Colombia.
Of course, this isn’t the first time Erik and Lyle have reached peak pop culture status. If you’re old enough to have watched the first Menendez trial on Court TV in the ’90s, Menendez 2024 is like time travel without the DeLorean. If you’re younger and just discovering the case, it’s a chance to stand up for victims of incest and sexual abuse. Or if you happen to have gone to high school with Erik Menendez, as I did—he would have graduated with the Calabasas High School class of 1989 if the family hadn’t relocated to Beverly Hills in his senior year—it’s a reminder that as his former classmates got married, had kids, maybe even retired, the brothers have been serving life sentences without the possibility of parole. They have repeatedly appealed their convictions and been denied, which meant they were expected to die in prison.
But now Erik and Lyle have three potential paths to freedom, all of which have been complicated by the November election, when tough-on-crime Nathan Hochman beat Los Angeles district attorney George Gascón in a rout. On November 26—one week before Hochman’s swearing-in ceremony—the DA’s office is scheduled to respond to the brother’s habeas petition, which argues that there are two new pieces of evidence in the case. A hearing to address whether they should be resentenced, per Gascón’s recommendation, is scheduled for December 11 before Judge Michael V. Jesic, but Hochman has indicated that he might ask for more time to review the case. “I’m not going to ask for delay, just for delay’s sake,” he said on Good Morning America. “We’ll ask for the minimal amount of time necessary to do this work, because we owe it to the Menendez brothers, we owe it to the public to get this decision right.” The brothers are also petitioning Governor Gavin Newsom for clemency, however, Newsom recently announced that he is deferring his decision so that the new DA has a chance to weigh in.
These legal strategies will continue to play out, and the world is watching, but considering the fact that the Menendez brothers killed their parents 35 years ago, why do we suddenly care so much about what happens to them?
When Katz Networks purchased Court TV in 2018, it wanted to relaunch the channel to capitalize on the true-crime wave that’s swept our entertainment shores like so many gruesome tsunamis. This made sense. According to a 2022 YouGov poll, true crime is one of the few things Americans can agree on at the moment: More than 50% of those surveyed said they consume it, be they female or male; Black, Hispanic, or white; rich, middle class, or poor; or Republican, independent, or Democrat. Court TV’s archival footage was part of the deal, so Menendez “back episodes,” for lack of a better phrase, were rereleased on the CourtTV website and on YouTube.
The Menendez murders always had the makings of a “hit”—two handsome brothers leading seemingly perfect lives in a famous zip code murder their glamorous parents in the goriest fashion possible, only for twisted family secrets to come out in court for all the world to see. They were also considered emblematic of a time when greed was good, boomers drove Beemers, Milli Vanilli was pretending to sing, and The Official Preppy Handbook was a bestseller. To say that they were unsympathetic figures in the ’90s would be an understatement. In the weeks after committing parricide, they famously treated themselves to purchases including Rolex watches, cars, and even a restaurant.
In court, the prosecution argued that the brothers killed Jose and Kitty out of pure greed. (Their inheritance was reportedly worth an estimated $14.5 million.) But according to the defense, they suffered years of abuse at the hands of their father, and their mother knew everything but looked the other way. Leslie Abramson, their famously hard-charging attorney, called 56 witnesses during the first trial in an attempt to prove that they were abused, and argued that Erik and Lyle murdered their parents because they feared Jose would make good on his threat to kill them both if they ever told anyone about the molestation. The first trial ended in a hung jury, and Dominick Dunne, who covered the case for Vanity Fair, wrote, “So what happened? I’ll tell you what happened. I was there, and these are my beliefs. Two juries took the word of two world-class liars, two rich, spoiled, arrogant losers who were already on the road to a criminal life when they shot their mother’s face off and their father’s brains out.” During the second trial, Judge Stanley Weisberg moved to ban testimony about their father’s alleged assaults—Alan Dershowitz coined the phrase “the abuse excuse”—and the brothers were found guilty.
Yet when Gen Z watched court footage during the COVID pandemic, they didn’t see Erik and Lyle as Bret Easton Ellis–style villains. The monster they saw was Jose, a man known to be so vicious that, in a recent documentary, even former district attorney Pamela Bozanich called his murder “an actual plus for mankind.” Erik was a handsome 22-year-old, and young women posted videos of him on TikTok while they lip-synched the lyrics, “Mama, I’m in love with a criminal,” from a Britney Spears song. Incest survivors revealed that they, like Erik and Lyle, were sexually abused as children and abandoned by the very people who were supposed to protect them. Alarmingly young-looking therapists posted mini tutorials on how to cope with the effects of complex PTSD, while a man speaking fluent French implored parents abused as kids to seek help before they had children of their own. Once the case was thoroughly meme-ified, Erik and Lyle got a hashtag: FreeTheMenendezBrothers.
English (US) ·