The Chilling (True) Story of the Menendez Brothers, Become a Netflix Series

On August 20, 1989, José and Mary Louise “Kitty” Menendez were shot to death in their beautiful home in an exclusive neighborhood of Beverly Hills. Nearly seven years and three trials later, their sons, Lyle and Erik, were found guilty of their murders.

There is a true story behind the series Monsters. The Lyle and Erik Menendez storycoming to Netflix on September 19, the second chapter of the anthology series by Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan. And it tells the story of the Menendez family, an illusory model of the American dream. José was born in Cuba, emigrated to the United States as a teenager after the Cuban Revolution in the 1950s, and lived in the attic of a cousin’s house until he got a college scholarship. In college, he met Mary Louise Anderson, a beauty queen everyone called Kitty. They married in the early 1960s and moved to New York City, where José graduated from Queens College: He went from washing dishes to working as a successful young executive in the entertainment world.

With sons Lyle and Erik, the Menendez family moved from Princeton, New Jersey, to Los Angeles, because José began working in the film industry. The Menendez brothers also seemed to correspond to the ideal of success of those years: Lyle was a tennis player and seemed destined for a brilliant career like that of the father. Erik turned out to be even better at tennisand became a national level player. José was a tough and demanding father, who wanted his sons to work hard until they were exhausted, in sports, but also in everything else.

After moving to California, however, the two brothers began to show signs of an internal crisis. Erik took part in a series of burglaries, and Lyle enrolled at Princeton University but was suspended for a year for plagiarism.

When José was 45 and Kitty was 47, they were killed by 15 shots from two hunting rifles. 12-gauge. On the night of the murders, the brothers told police that they had gone out to see a movie at the cinema, but had to stop to get Erik’s documents: it was then that they discovered their parents’ bodies and called for help.

In the months following the murders, however, the two Menendez brothers behaved not like two boys who had lost both their parents in a brutal and bloody murder, but like those who had just won the lottery: within six months, they spent about $700,000.

Lyle, who was 21 at the time of the murders, bought a Rolex, a Porsche, a bag of clothes, and a restaurant in Princeton, where he had been living before the murders. Erik bought a Jeep Wrangler, hired a personal tennis coach, and invested $40,000 in a rock concert that never took place. They also took several vacations to exotic locations.

After the murders, Erik confessed the crime to his psychologist, Dr. Jerome Ozielwho in turn confided in Judalon Smyth, a woman with whom he was having an extramarital affair. Oziel then managed to record the confession of both brothers. After an argument with his lover, Smyth contacted the Beverly Hills police to reveal that the Menendezes had killed their parents. Lyle was arrested on March 8, 1990. Erik, who was in Israel at the time for a tennis tournament, flew to Miami and then to Los Angeles, where he turned himself in to the police on March 11.

It took two full years to determine whether the confession tapes were covered by attorney-client privilege or admissible as evidence in court. Finally, the California Supreme Court ruled that two of the three tapes were suitable for use in the trial, which began in 1993.

In court, prosecutors argued that the Menendez brothers were after their inheritance, but Lyle and Erik revealed that they killed in self-defense. They said that their father had molested them for yearsLyle from 6 to 8 and Erik from 6 to 18, and that their mother had struggled with alcoholism and drug addiction, and had never protected them from violence. More recently, singer Roy Rosselló of the band Menudo also accused José Menendez of sexual assault.

Both Lyle and Erik were sentenced to life in prison. They remained in separate prisons until 2018, when they were allowed to serve their sentences in the same facility, in San Diego.