The true story behind Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story
The second season of Ryan Murphy's anthology series dramatises the case that gripped America in the 1990s
Ryan Murphy's Monsters tackles an all new true crime case that shocked America, the killings of José and Mary Louise “Kitty” Menendez by their sons Lyle and Erik Menendez in 1989.
The Netflix series follows on from the mega-hit Dahmer, with the next instalment in the anthology series starring Javier Bardem, Chlo? Sevigny, Nicholas Alexander Chavez and Cooper Koch in the respective roles of José, Kitty, Lyle and Erik Menendez. Exploring how the brutal murders came to happen, the show takes inspiration from the real-life story that gripped a nation.
With the series dramatising real-time events, viewers are likely curious about the real story behind the drama. Here is everything you need to know.
The true story behind Monsters
Monsters centres on Lyle and Erik Menendez, who killed their parents on 20 August 1989 by shooting them at close range, their father had been shot eight times while their mother had been shot five times.
At first, the brothers claimed that they found their parents dead in their Beverly Hills home after going out for the evening, and authorities first considered the double-homicide was a mob hit because of how brutal the killings were per a 1989 report from The Los Angeles Times.
Read more: Everything we know about Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story
Police turned their attention to the Menendez brothers after the pair had confessed to killing their parents during a consultation with Erik's psychiatrist Dr. Jerome Oziel. The medical practitioner told his mistress about the confession, and she went to police with the taped conversation.
After their arrest in 1990, the Lyle and Erik Menendez case became explosive for the public, with interest in the killings only being further fuelled by the family's affluent status. José Menendez had been a powerful Hollywood executive, while Erik was an up-and-coming tennis star who was quickly rising the ranks — he was at a tennis tournament when his brother was arrested, and turned himself in when he found out what happened upon his return.
Watch: The trailer for Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez story
The brothers were put on trial in 1993 and it became the subject of much public attention after it was televised on Court TV, a cable network that had just launched.
During their trial the Menendez brothers's lawyer Leslie Abramson argued that they killed their parents because they believed their father would kill them after they threatened to publicly reveal the years of sexual, physical and emotional abuse at his hands. The prosecution argued they committed the crime to access their inheritance, the pair had already spent a significant amount of it at the time of their arrest.
The Menendez brother's cousin Diane Vander Molen testified in court that Lyle had told her about their father abusing them in 1976, he was eight at the time.
She spoke publicly about the matter for the first time in 2017, when she told ABC News: "I know that they would never, ever have done what they did unless they felt that they had no choice — that it was either them or their parents. I believe that very strongly."
Vander Molen explained that Lyle had come to her one night and asked to sleep in the bed next to her because he was scared his father would enter his room in the night.
She told the publication that she went to their mother Kitty to speak about the situation: “By her demeanor, I could tell that she was not believing any of this. And [she] went downstairs, and Lyle had already gotten into the bed next to mine, and she went ahead and yanked him by the arm and took him back upstairs and I never heard anything else about that."
The brothers' first trial ended with two hung juries, they each had their own jury, and the pair were retried together in 1995. The judge, Stanley Weisberg, excluded evidence of their father abusing them from the trial, and cameras were also not allowed in the courtroom as they were in the first trial.
The brothers were found guilty of two counts of first-degree murder and conspiracy to murder in 1995, they were sentenced to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole in 1996.
Lyle and Erik Menendez were incarcerated separately out of fear they would conspire to escape prison together, but they were reunited in prison in 2018.
The brothers have spoken publicly about the murders and their sentence, with Erik telling People in 2005 that he felt they didn't deserve life imprisonment: "I’m not saying what I did was right or justifiable. I needed to go to prison. But place another child in my life and see what happens. I felt it was either my life or my parents’ life.
"It’s as if there was kerosene all over the floor that a match could light at any time. And my soul was burnt to death. The way I reacted was so destructive to all. It was the most awful devastation."
He added: "People say that I had everything, that I was rich and lived in Beverly Hills. But if you had photos of the events of my childhood, they would be crime photos. I was dying long before the night I killed my parents."
Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story is out now on Netflix.
