20/20 - True Crime Vault: Inside the Menendez Movement

Episode Date: January 6, 2026

Convicted murderer Lyle Menendez speaks out from prison following the Menendez Brothers’ newfound TikTok fame. (OAD: 4/02/2021) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Welcome to the 2020 True Crime Vault, where heart-stopping headlines come to life. I wish everything would stop. Let me breathe. What happened? Who was the person that's doing shot? My mom and my dad. Your mom and dad? My mom and dad. Okay.

Careful what you wish for People assume that if you have money, you have no problems and you're certainly not going to do anything like kill your parents. Now suddenly enter TikTok. Amazing, the Menendez story going viral in 2021. I don't believe they got a phone trial. They don't deserve to live the rest of their life in prison. I think they're seen as the victim.

of a less enlightened time. I would say people my generation predominantly do believe that it wasn't active self-defense. I just told them. I don't know. Who could imagine 30 years after a double murder that Gen Z on TikTok would take on the Menendez case? Careful what you wish for. Okay. Wait.

TikTok has been this hub for Gen Z in so many ways, and now we're seeing them kind of turn their eye towards the criminal justice system. Calling all true crime fans. It's not supposed to happen in Beverly Hills. A movie executive and his wife were brutally slain in their million-dollar mansion. As I went into the room, I just started firing.

What was in front of you? my parents Millions of young people are looking back online and they're re-examining old news stories from the 90s and 2000s particularly and looking at them with a fresh shed of eyes. The Menendez Brothers story was one of the most sensational murder trials

of the 1990s. You saw a spoiled rich kid spinning out of control. So when the videos first started coming out, the content being created around the Menendez Brothers was about how hot they were. The first video is that my first video is that My son showed me on TikTok where a lot of young women who were lip-sicking to the Britney Spears song, Mama, I'm in love with a criminal.

People are like, oh, who is this, like, hot guy on the court stand, you know? And then I think people started doing the research into the Menendez case and being like, oh, this is like sick and twisted. Like, this is so wrong. It's a lot of kids going back watching court TV, seeing how everything was broken. portrayed, but looking at it with a fresh set of eyes and a different set of values. This new movement probably started approximately when Court TV published the original courtroom footage. For the first time, people could be a menendistur themselves.

Like, people in my generation wanted to defend the brothers and be like these kids went through some horrible things, and it wasn't right what happened to them. They said they did it because they've been sexually abused. The question in the trial, If you believe that they were sexually abused, does that lessen their responsibility for murder? I think there is such an emotional response because this case involves sexual abuse of children. The emotion was just so real to me. We're all authentic. I believed it. I don't believe that someone can fake that kind of emotion. These kids have a lot of power to shape the cultural narrative. You know, things start trending.

And before you know it, you have millions of people that aren't even on TikTok paying attention to this case again. My name is Lyle Menendez. I've been incarcerated in 31 years. I am the kid that did kill his parents. And no river of peers has used them. No amount of regret of change. amount of regret has changed that you are almost defined by a few moments of your life. But that's not who you are in your life.

Your life is your totality of it. I think I will end up dying, still be in the nightmare of this horrifying event, Bring down the Berlin Wall. Mild and Eric Menendez seemed to have it all. They lived in this fairy tale world of wealth and country clubs. They were top flight tennis players, one of them at Princeton, the other one heading to UCLA. They were rich.

The father was a powerful Hollywood executive. They had achieved the American dream. They were living in the mansion in Beverly Hills. They were living behind the gate. So on the outside to most people, this was the perfect all-American family. People assume that if you have money, you have no problems. And you're certainly not going to do anything like that. kill your parents because you got it made.

And it turns out that rich people have dysfunctional families just as much as poor people. One kid killing the parents is a bad seed. Two kids killing the parents is a bad family. Jose Menendez was an immigrant. He wanted to make good and he was very driven. to become the American success story. He emigrated from Cuba at about the age of 16.

He was the only boy, and mother adored him, and emphasized his machismo in his male image, so much so that he became a little bit of a bully in Cuba, and he became a little bit of a monster to the parents. It was hard to control him. Here is a Cuban immigrant coming to this country as a teenager with very little driving, driving, driving through industry after industry, rental cars, music industry, Hollywood production,

one after another with this ferocious drive and talent. Jose and Kitty Menendez met when they were both students at Southern Illinois University. Kitty was my sister, my younger sister. She was stunningly beautiful, and I mean beautiful on the outside and even more so on the inside. Jose saw on her what everybody else saw on her and she saw this handsome Cuban they got married when they were both in college

and then after graduation they moved to New York the snipers bullet cut down the most significant change in the marriage of Jose and Kitty Menendez took place when their sons Eric and Lyle were born Kitty Menendez had dreams of becoming an actress and after her sons were born, Jose basically told her, you can't work.

You need to take care of our sons. The boys were extremely spoiled. I would tell Kitty, I said, you know, there's got to be self-discipline in their life somewhat, and I think it would be smart for you to rein them in a little bit and hold them accountable for some of the things that they do. And, of course, she would come right back, and Brian, don't tell me how to raise my boys.

She wanted Lyle and Eric to be as competitive as she was, and as their husband was. When I think of Jose Menendez and his sons, the word that pops into my head is ownership. These were his prized thoroughbred, his sons. They were going to reflect his own glory. And if they didn't, God help them. The world that the Menendez brothers grew up in

was very affluent, and it started in Princeton, New Jersey. Jose had... success on both coasts. First, the leafy precincts of Princeton, New Jersey on the East Coast, and then all the way in California, Beverly Hills, of one of the legendary and luxurious places of the world. In Princeton, we saw them as rich kids. They were like a step above everybody else. Princeton was about all money, and you didn't show off, but they were different. As Jose changed jobs and became involved in different companies, this beautiful home in the center of Princeton came on the market.

And they just both fell in love with it, and they wound up buying it. And so this is a beautiful stately, up there with a beautiful sort of a reservoir or a detention pond behind the home, which again is also beautiful. And she was so proud of it. Jose and Kenny Menendez were very concerned about the facade of the facade of the about the facade of their family. They wanted the public image to be perfect.

And one of the ways they did that was they did their son's homework. So the homework was always perfect. And then they would take tests in school and they would fail the test. Another way was to tell their sons who they could date, who they could be friends with. Lyle and Eric were very influenced

by what their father thought. And they wanted, at all times, to please dad. The affluence was all around them but they were expected to work for it and the work was to become tennis stars. They were going to be at the country club owning the scene there. They were going to have beautiful girls on their arms and go to Ivy League, top-notch colleges. He gave them everything in Princeton. Limousine rides to New York, limo rights to school, because in that extent, he was showing off

through the kids. Lyle Menendez was going to be the better improved version of Jose. For Jose Menendez, having a son go to an Ivy League school like Princeton was the end of the American dream. But Lyle Menendez had mediocre grades, was not a great student, he really wasn't Princeton material. He was a very strong tennis player. And so through a combination of his tennis abilities and also Jose Menendez, he was a very strong tennis player, he was a very strong tennis player. and also Jose Menendez made a $50,000 donation to Princeton. He was able to actually get his son into the school.

But Lyle was flunking out of Princeton, not only academically, but socially. He was doing things he wasn't supposed to do. He was accused at one point of plagiarizing a paper, and he was suspended for that. Jose Menendez rushed in to meet with a dean and to try to save his son, to try to stop the suspension. But his pleas didn't work. Joe was never satisfied. Lyle and Eric, I think, had a strong fear of dad. It was so obvious, but it was not spoken.

Jose was such a dominant force in that family that the brothers looked at him. It was like he was the son and blotted everything else out. The impression I got about Jose Menendez's character was that he could be charming when he chose to, but that his basic nature was very abusive and that he was abusive to his sons especially and to his wife. Describe your relationship with your father.

Brutal, painful, torturous, and yet I admired him because he was so strong. He was everything that success was that I was taught. that success was. And I thought that he was the most powerful and brilliant person I had ever met. To me, Menendez brothers became homicidal monsters that were shaped by Jose Menendez. FX is the beauty. Imagine the hottest new super drug that makes you effortlessly beautiful. From executive producer, Ryan Murphy.

This is the closest to the fountain of youth any man is ever going to get. Are there side effects? I just went in, woke up, and it looked like this. I would like the first book. FX is the beauty. Premiers January 21st on FX, Hulu, and Hulu on Disney Plus for bundle subscribers. This show is supported by Chime. Chime is changing the way you bank.

Chime believes that your money is yours, which means you shouldn't have to pay fees to use it. So they offer smart, fees. free banking for everyday people. Their smart features include tools like MyPay, which gives you access to up to $500 of your paycheck anytime, and get you paid up to two days early with direct deposit. There are never any overdraft fees or minimum balance fees. It's stress-free and fee-free, with overdraft protection you can count on. Plus, with Chime Card, you can build credit history with your own money and get rewarded for everyday spending. No annual fees, no interest, no strings attached. Chim's not just smarter banking. It's the most rewarding way to bank.

Join the millions who are already banking, fee-free, today. It just takes a few minutes to sign up. Head to chime.com slash 20, spelled out T-W-E-N-T-Y. That's chime.com slash 20. Chime is a financial technology company, not a bank. Bank, bank, and my-pay line of credit provided by the Bank-N-A or Stride Bank N-A. My-P-E eligibility requirements apply, and credit limit ranges $20 to $500.

Option and products may have fees or charges. See chime.com slash fees info. Advertised annual percentage yield with Chime Plus status only. Otherwise, 1.00% APY applies. No min balance required. Chime card on-time payment history may have a positive impact on your credit score. Results may vary. See chime.com for details and applicable terms. Hi, fellow Americans, I've spoken to you from this historic office on many occasions and about many things.

For 20 years, the Menendez family had been living in Princeton, New Jersey, and then Jose became an executive with careful pictures in live entertainment, and the family moved to California in 1987. Initially, the Menendez family lived in the Los Angeles suburb of Calabasasas, And they were really proud to have this house that they had found there and they were remodeling it. There was tennis courts and everything else available there. And this is just the most beautiful setting. I think the cheapest property in here is probably 2 million, and it goes all the way up to 22 million.

Frankie Avalon raised his six children here. Robert Blake lived here. Bruce Jenner, when he was Bruce Jenner, had a high house. had a house here. Very spoiled, a lot of the kids. A lot of kids got involved with drugs. This is Mahal and Highway. Just starting into Calabasas.

25 years ago, this was all open land. Eric and I used to come up here all the time. This is about eight to nine minutes from our high school, and we used to do some writing up here and look out over the valley. Eric and I, we just hit it off from the beginning. We both were chess players, we were both thinkers, were both kind of outside the box in school,

and we were in our rebellious phase and independent phase of 16, 17 years old, and we just had something that clicked. He was a little bit different, he was pretty ostentatious, and he was flamboyance, but well-liked. He would do things like walk into a store, and if somebody wouldn't immediately help him, he would jump up on a table and start throwing shoes and say, I'm here to buy something.

He made himself known, and he was a presence, and he was a presence, and he, wanted what he wanted and found a way to get it. Eric and Lyle Menendez kept screwing up. They were hanging out with a group of friends that began doing what was called hot prowls in which they would sneak into a house when nobody was there and I think about committing a burglary.

But it was just a group of suburban kids that were, you know, dreaming about the fantasy of committing a crime. At one point, Lyle Menendez actually committed a burglary with several of his friends. Lyle had taken some things from a girlfriend's house and showed his little brother that he had done this crime. And his little brother said, well, I can do the same thing. And Eric went in and stole something, but then wanted to put it back before anybody knew. He just wanted to show his older brother that could be done.

The initial victims were the parents of some of their friends. And in the first burglary, over $100,000 of items were taken out of the house, including cash and jewelry taken from a safe. Now, it was my understanding that their burglaries consisted of backing up a moving van to a house that was empty and cleaning out the house, which is different from breaking into a house and stealing the family's silver. What's that about? I think they were practicing to be criminals. I think they thought being criminals would be a fun way to earn a living.

They just got bored with life, and they wanted excitement. They wanted challenges, and robbing houses was a challenge, something. and they tried to get away with, and they didn't think they'd be caught. They wind up getting arrested, and Jose, in his inimitable way, decided that he was going to quickly put it to rest. He didn't want it in the newspapers, and he went out, and he visited every one of the homes that had been robbed, and he asked them what the value was of anything that was missing, and they gave him a number of price of what they felt that it was worth.

He apologized, and his son apologized, and he wrote, him a check right on the spot. Joe, when he found out that the children had been arrested, the main message was, how stupid of you to get caught? You're like sheep that follow. You're not leaders. And he was ashamed by them getting caught. Because I think Jose thought that life was about winning.

And probably it was not as important how you got there. I think the parents lost control of them in part because they were in a culture where money can buy you anything, not just the BMW or the designer jeans, it can buy you a free pass out of trouble. When poor kids do a burglary, like they go to their neighbor's house and take the big screen TV,

they go to juvenile court or they go on probation or something like that. When rich kids do it, they go to the psychiatrist. So I'm fairly certain that that was part of their court-ordered treatment for their burglary problem. All I know is that they both got probation. They gave the stuff back.

And I think it's shortly thereafter, they moved down to Beverly Hills and left the Calabasasas area, and Jose kind of said, let's distance ourselves from the Calabasasas crowd. There are people, a great number of people, who think that you two are spoiled brats. What do you say to them?

I don't know that there's anything I can say to them. Because I came from a family of wealth, It doesn't make me spoiled I'm just a normal kid Oh Eric You're a normal kid who killed your parents And you still say you're a normal kid Well I didn't have normal experiences

But I am I did that And there's not a day that goes by That I don't think about what happened And wish that I could take that moment back Is it hard for you? Is it hard for you? It is difficult to be, you know, a whole 28 years defined by a day.

Lyle Menendez was the alpha male of these two brothers. He was the one with the charisma, with a kind of sinister intelligence, high functioning, but cunning. And more than anything, he had a willpower, like his father. who mastered Hollywood by being ruthless and cunning and capable of destroying adversaries in business. I think the Menendos brothers were close because they were fighting the common enemy, which was their father.

He believed that life is like war and that anything you do to achieve your end is fine, including, it turns out, killing your parents. By early 1989, the Menendez family was living in a mansion in Beverly Hills. The Beverly Hills house on North Elm was amazing. When we saw it for the first time, we said, Kitty, the house is so marvelous. Everything just shines of money. I think we're pretty normal here.

Not much different than anywhere else. Out of the kids, 16, you get that convertible BMW. Some had multiple cars, you know, Mercedes, a Porsche, and a Lamborghini. Maybe kids have a little more privileges, but I don't really think it's different from anywhere else. Some, you could see that their value system was upside down. Jose and Kitty both were really having second thoughts about having been so generous. She was very concerned about the irresponsibility of.

Lyle. He just felt that he could do anything, and it didn't make any difference whether it was ethical or not. At a certain point, Eric and Lyle Menendez became a disappointment to their parents. Jose Menendez didn't approve of the women that Lyle was dating. Lyle was very fascinating young man to women. So Lyle had women all the time, and they were purported to be Victoria's secret. Rick models. Lyle is now in his 20s. He didn't stay in college.

And my sister Kitty began to recognize that they had essentially raised a playboy. And they took his credit cards away to try to educate him. He was really upset. And what he started to do was steal their credit cards and go out and buy when he wanted to buy

anyway. Eric was a disappointment in other ways. And whatever Joe thought would be the right way for a young man to behave. I met Eric Menendez when I was doing a photo shoot in Beverly Hills. He was natural in front of the camera. He was very comfortable.

I don't think Eric had really the physical attributes to be a working model, but he was photogenic. I think Eric was struggling to find his way. and I don't know the insides of what went on in their house because he didn't talk about it. I don't know if it was awful. I don't know the truth about that. But that last photo shoot, something was a little bit different

and he was quieter and he was a little bit more withdrawn, a little bit more humble. But when I look at the pictures and when I think about it, now I can see that there was a difference. Those pictures, to me, looked very lonely and haunting. And I'm not so sure that I was looking into his soul, but in retrospect, there's something coming out of him that I didn't see on a regular basis.

In the late 80s, early 90s, what people may have forgotten is that being gay was not that acceptable. It was just, I mean, gay marriage was decades off at that time. From what I knew of Jose Menendez, he would not have been the kind of father who would have embraced that. Did your father accuse you of being gay? Is it one of the things he used to say to tear you down? Yes.

The prosecutor brought up the fact that you might have been a homosexual and that this might have caused some of the fury on your father's part. Yes, he did. I didn't hear about girlfriends. They were there. I guess what I just have to say to you is, are you gay? No. I'm not gay. Kitty was so upset the way things were happening,

And she was trying very, very hard to understand why they were doing what they were doing. She was also very worried about the state of her marriage because she discovered that Jose had been carrying on an eight-year affair with a woman in New York. And that was extremely upsetting to her. She was very frustrated. She was disappointed.

She was concerned that Jose was going to leave her. I don't think they trusted each other. They didn't particularly show affection. I don't think they ever touched each other. Jose Menendez, unknown to the mistress in New York, also had a woman that he was seen here in Los Angeles. She was explaining me what the situation was and how it hurt her.

And the one thing she said to me, and I'll never forget it, she said, you know, the most difficult thing for me, Brian, is that I've lost my hero. Jose Menendez was carrying on affairs with a woman in New York, a woman in LA, and he was also being supplied with prostitutes by a madam here in Los Angeles. It appeared to me that Kitty Menendez was the maid and the chauffeur,

and that the three men in her life were dominant. I think that her whole personality had been erased by the family, and that she didn't have the ability or the wherewithal to stand up to her husband. I knew that Kitty didn't have a lot of friends, and she did have a very private life. But I know that she loved her sons and she loved Jose. This is a woman who was enduring the dissolution of her family.

Her husband was cheating on her. Her sons had turned into criminal louts and she couldn't handle it. Tried to keep up a brave face with some people. Popped pills when it got too much for her. At one point, she was rushed to a hospital after taking an overdose of volume. People at the hospital felt that she had actually tried to commit suicide. She told Jose's sister, she wished the brothers had never been born.

Describe your relationship with your mother. My mother was a person in a lot of pain, and she was alcoholic, and she was suicidal. There was not a lot of communication, but I saw her as, I saw heard and saw her get beaten by my dad. Your mother was battered. Battered. Physically?

Physically? Certainly emotionally. And I would try to help her through it. We went through it together. I don't think she was depressed in Beverly Hills. What I did see is the situation that took place with Lyle. Lyle was stressing her a lot. And the thing with Calabasas just about broke her emotional back

when she realized how far her son would go to basically have whatever he wanted. And so it was very, very painful to the two of them, but I think it was especially painful to Kitty. And then in the spring of 1989, Jose Menendez had several conversations with his brother-in-law, Carlos Burrell, in which he told them he was disappointed in his sons

and that he was thinking about taking them out of his will. So everybody was starting to have problems, and those problems were starting to spin the family out of control. We wrote a screenplay. We wrote several screenplays. We were ambitious young writers with a lot of ideas, and we said, well, let's write murder mysteries. Eric wrote a script about a boy that kills his parents to collect the insurance.

And he brought that by for me to read and give him my opinion. A glove hand is seen gripping the doorknob and turning it gently. Good evening, mother, good evening, father. His voices of attempted compassion, but the hatred overwhelms it. All light is extinguished, and the camera slides down the stairs as screamed. are heard behind. We needed the characters to get money somehow and thought, well, here's an interesting way to do it.

And it showed the Darwinistic tendencies of the child toward the parents, remove them, and then I'm free and I can do what I want. But as time went by, Eric took that screenplay and reworded the first four or five pages to exactly what happened at the scene of the crime. And so people thought, well, maybe this is the precursor to what actually happened. He's already got the idea, and he's already beginning to execute in his mind, the crime that he will eventually commit, murdering his parents for money, for the insurance money. It was powerful evidence that he'd been not just thinking about it,

but playing with the idea, scoping it out, writing it down. I thought that it was probably pretty unreal. A bit of nonsense. I didn't contemplate that he was really planning to do such a thing. Not on any day did I think that. If you looked at the Menendez brothers as teenagers, you saw spoiled rich kids spinning out of control. They were literally criminals.

They were stealing. They were robbing. But the viciousness that Lyle and Eric Menendez eventually demonstrated, I think that has its seeds in their relationship with their father. Any way you cut it, Jose Menendez, was the kind of person that people cowered from. Everybody described Jose Menendez as someone we should be afraid of,

someone who was always expecting perfection and never got it. When we went to their house, there was a ferret, always. And the ferrette died one day. And Katie and Joe assumed that one of their dogs had killed it. And one of their dogs was a black, very aggressive. They had aggressive dogs. The children opened the refrigerator one day and found the dog's head inside.

On the Tuesday before the murders, Lyell Menendez and his mother, Kitty, were having an argument. She got so upset that she began striking the older brother, and she even ripped off his toupee. And Eric was actually in the hallway, and he saw this happen, And he didn't even know that his brother was wearing a toupee.

Which his father had forced him to wear because he started having thinning hair. And the brothers had a very emotional conversation in which they agreed that there were so many secrets in the family. And at that point, Eric broke down and he started crying. And his brother said, what's wrong with you? What are you crying about? And Eric said, Dad, Dad has been doing things to me. to me. When Lyle told me about the abuse, he was eight years old at the time.

One night, I was in my room, changing the sheets on my bed, and Liled him in, saying that he was afraid to sleep in his own bed because his father and him had been touching each other down there. And I went upstairs and got Kitty, by her demeanor, I could tell that she was not believing any of this. There was certainly no indication of any kind that there was ever any abuse. He had sexually molested me before I was a teenager, and it was a much different experience than Eric's.

Because you were little? Because I was little, I guess. But it was difficult to be close to my father and yet have so much conflict in the home. I mean, it just didn't happen. It just didn't happen. I think the motor was strictly money. my impression was that their father had cut them off I think somewhere starting with Lyle

there was a decision that this was just not going to be okay it was not going to be okay to live in Beverly Hills and be paupers or to have less than they had they got cut off and that wasn't cool the source of the hatred wasn't that they wanted the money was the sexual abuse the source of the homicide was that how dare he take away the money in other words the two theories

of this case aren't necessarily contradictory. I was with Kitty in her Beverly Hills house, and she was using her computer. And I said, what are you doing with the computer? And she said, I'm changing my will. And as I looked down the aisle of the house, I said to Kitty, Lyle's hearing you. He's going to know that you're changing your will right now.

And she said, I don't care. She said, they know I'm not going to give them any money. No, no, no, that's not how that occurred. There was a confrontation. It's very difficult to understand the emotion and the fear and the conflict that is building over the years to something like this. It's difficult to just say, well, this is why this happened. There was going to be a violent confrontation at some point.

And I thought in the end that would probably be killed. When it first was revealed that I had told Lyle, I was sexually molested by my father. My dad said to Lyle, you're going to tell everyone, and I'm not going to let that happen. And that's when we bought the guns. The week before they were murdered, I had lunch with Kitty. She had never been happier. She said that she was getting along with Jose. So she thought that everything was doing better.

At that time, there'd be good days, there'd be bad days. And Kitty had a sense of hope, I think, as would be natural. She didn't want this family to split apart and all the secrets of it, perhaps, to spill out. She didn't want to lose what she had. And I think you can hear in her the last strands of hope for this family. August 20, 1989, was an unusually warm, balmy evening in Beverly Hills. Most of the neighbors who live near the Menendez mansion at 722 North Allen Drive had their windows open to let fresh air in. Beverly Hills is a quiet town.

Even the business district kind of folds up at 7 o'clock. We average two murders a year and really don't know what you're in for when you get a murder call. What's the problem? What's the problem? I'm sorry to kill my parents. Pardon me? No, too. What? Who? Are they still there? Yes.

The people... No, no. Were they shot? Yes. What happened? What happened? What happened? What was the person that was shot?

What happened? Who is the person that was shot? My mom and my dad. Your mom and dad? My mom and dad. My mom and my dad. Okay, hold on a second. Okay, we're on the way over there with an ambulance.

12 shots in the middle of Beverly Hills on a Sunday night and no one calls the police. We're waiting at the house. No one shows up. And I still can't believe it. I'm sitting on the stairs afterwards thinking the police are going to be there in seconds. seconds. They've got roving patrol. And people, many, many people did hear the shots. Many neighbors came in and said they heard all these shots, but nobody called because I just figured this is Beverly Hills. This doesn't happen in Beverly Hills. So you called the

police, but at that point you had already decided. We had decided not to. You weren't going to say anything. We had decided that our feeling was not, we'll just explain what happened and it'll be okay. We were very stunned and we felt that we would go to jail. obviously, and we, it was a selfish reason to just not want to have to go through that. You know, by this intersection, I could actually see the police tape and the police cars in front of Nenda's house. Hello, this is police department. Yes. Okay, I want you to come outside.

Okay, come out the door and hear you tell your brother, everybody that's, come outside. Okay, okay. As we walked in the front door, the only thing I could really detect is the silence. It was just eerily quiet. It was just so quiet inside. From the foyer was a staircase, and then in the back of the foyer was this library family room, which is where the murder occurred. The television was on, so it was just a normal evening for them.

A kitty was wearing white. She was covered in blood. Jose had a shotgun blast in the back of his head, blood everywhere. There was brain matter on the ceiling, on the windows. It was really horrendous. When Jose and Kitty were found dead, the police didn't do what they normally do in a case like that. There are things that could have been done that night that would have proven that they were the killers. The murder weapons were.

in their cars. Nobody bothered to look. Both brothers had gunshot residue on their hands. At the time, we felt they were victims, and you're not going to press them because their parents just got blown away. A Beverly Hills criminal is going to be treated differently than a South Central Los Angeles criminal, because the police understand that the Beverly Hills criminal is going to lawyer up, they're going to file complaints. Rich people view the police as being sort of lower than cleaning people, okay? And so I think that influenced the way this case was prosecuted. The sons told police they left their parents at home to go to the movies.

The pair said they came home from a movie and found their parents lying dead in pools of blood. We didn't have an alibi. All we did was say we were at the movies. But they'd never check you for blood and powder. We did fool the police. That day they didn't. I bet you they changed her policy.

When I first heard Joe and Kitty had been murdered. I said with tears in my eyes, this is awful, most awful thing I've ever heard. But what if it had been the kids? I don't know why I said that, but I must have had some basic instinct in the back of my head that told me that might be the case. I was in St. Louis.

in training for a new job, and I had my dog with me. I had my Dalmatian puppy, and I was watching the news. Jose was shot five times, once to the head, and four others to the body. And I just about squeezed the life out of my dog. I had nightmares. I had nightmares about it. I could see their house, and I could see them taking them out, as I saw on TV, the bodies. It took me a while to figure it out, and what it was.

that I remembered that I had the script about the boy that kills his parents to collect the insurance. And that was a very chilling realization to me. Tell me as clearly as you can why you murdered your parents. I was

so afraid. I was running downstairs and I was crying and my mother was on the couch and she had been drinking and she said, what's wrong with you? And I said, nothing, nothing. You wouldn't understand.

And she said, oh, I understand. What do you think I'm stupid? And she told me that she'd known all my life what my father was doing. And Lyle said to my mother, are you going to let this happen? And she said to him, you ruin this family. A few days before, I had said to myself, I'm never going to let my father touch me again. And just before the shootings, my dad told me to get to my room.

He was going to come up, and there was going to be sex. It was like an explosion in my mind. You know, I'm just a normal kid. Oh, Eric, you're a normal kid who killed your parents. I know. The pair said they came home from a movie and found their parents lying dead in pools of blood. Just let me breathe.

And what did you do after you reloaded? I ran around and shot my mom. For 12 years, Eric Menendez was sexually molested by his father. It became like a war shock test. You looked at Lyle Menendez, Eric Menendez, you either saw cynical, sinister, vicious killers, or you saw victims. The sex abuse defense, the abuse excuse, was new. But now, 30 years later, and on social media like TikTok, Gen Z is way.

millions of young people are looking back online and they're reexamining old news stories from the 90s and 2000s particularly and looking at them with a fresh set of eyes people are like oh who is this like hot guy on the court stand and then I think people started doing the research into the Menendez case they don't deserve to live the rest of their life in prison I think they've gone there enough and it's time that they come home For 100 days, I'm going to cross the seven continents because the answers to everything important

are out there at the edges of our world. I'm stepping into the unknown. Where are we going to see our planet? This is amazing. As it's never been seen before. From pole to pole. Poll to Poll with Will Smith. Series premiered Tuesday, January 13th at 9 on National Geographic.

Stream on Disney Plus and Hulu. Show me the way. The college football playoff isn't over. Not yet. That epic run, that wild dream, not over till the clock hits zero. Till the stadium shakes. Till the wild things are let loose.

Till the trophy is lifted and the confetti falls. This is the national championship. When it's over, you'll feel it. This is the wild world of college football. The CFP National Championship, Monday, January 19th at 7.30 p.m. Eastern on ESPN and the ESPN app. I was just living in the wake of what happened. Now you have secrets upon secrets.

You're not living in the reality of what has occurred and why it occurred with. anyone in your life. You're almost like emotionally, you're a ghost. You're just living like a ghost among people that are alive. So you just, you're just a drift. Entertainment executive Jose Menendez and his wife were slain in the family room of their Beverly Hills mansion by killers using 12-gauge shotguns. They were murdered, killed gangland style in cold blood. Homicide detectives say it could have been a mob hit, contract killing.

They tried to make it look like a mafia hit by the kneecapping. They told the police it was a mafia hit. The son said they discovered the bodies when they arrived home several hours later. I've never seen anything like it. They weren't real. Wax. They looked like wax. It's something that I've never seen my dad help us.

you know i think that possibly if law and i would have been home maybe my dad would be alive the police felt it necessary to start investigating the organized crime aspect and they soon realized that was a dead end they knew that the brothers had done it but knowing it and proving it are two different things i remember it was the morning after the murder i pulled up to the house and then all of a sudden my car door slammed open and Eric jumped in and scared that hell out of me frantically said to me that they needed my husband's legal help I said Eric what's going on here

he says Mrs. Wright my parents were murdered last night and I said what he was not sad not crying no emotion whatsoever who would think of legal advice the day of your parents' murder unless you guilty I don't know how much they thought they were going to get but I understand the estate was worth about $14 million at the time

in the days following the murders of Jose and Katie Menendez Eric Menendez was a complete mess he was emotionally distraught and several days after the murders Craig Signorelli claims that Eric Menendez confessed to him and told him that he was responsible for the deaths of his parents it was a friend of mine that called me and said did turn on the TV

How many shots do you think went off? About six in a row. My first instinct was to call Eric and get to Eric and find out what happened. We went back to the house and eventually sat down at a chessboard, and he looked up from the chessboard, and as he had his fingers on the pieces, he said, do you want to know what happened? And I made a big mistake and said, yes.

I can remember him telling me where the blood and skin landed, and literally being in the room where it happened. It was a very intense, heavy moment. I realized that conversation was going to change my life and change his life. And, you know, he had now burdened me with something that I was stuck with a pretty heavy moral dilemma. So Craig didn't know how to take that,

whether he was saying it as a new plot for a new script or whether he did commit this murder. Five weeks after the murders, Eric and Lyle Menendez received an insurance policy payout of $400,000. They went on a huge spending spree. I mean, if I kill my parents, I don't think I'd buy a Porsche the first week. One kid brought a Rolex watch, another a brand new Porsche, another bought a restaurant in Princeton, New Jersey. I mean, the list goes on and on. They weren't shattered and traumatized by grief.

They were having a grand old time spending. the money of the dead man. You went off in a spending spree? I mean, I would think that you would be in such grief that you wouldn't be able to buy Rolexes and invest in businesses. Explain to me, let me understand. I'm, you know, I'm the public.

I mean, Lyle didn't buy anything without first approving it with my uncle or my aunt. You weren't just too greedy kids who wanted a lot of money, that's what you're saying. I didn't know what to do with the money. I went to... I got to a point where I have all this money and so much pain, I don't know what to do with it.

Do you still think about the night of the murder? Every day. I had a dream once that was my mother having been shot, hugging me and me hugging her, and I woke up crying, and I woke up, and I said, I'm back in the nightmare. I want to go back. I can never forgive myself. I just could not face God.

I could not face God with what I had done. It's hard to live with that, and I thought of suicide. And for six months, I was in agony, and I just wanted someone to talk to, and I couldn't tell anyone. You went to your psychologist, Dr. Oseill, and told him that you had committed this crime. You were in torment, and you told him. I felt that I was the worst person on earth, and it got to a point where I couldn't live with myself anymore, and I needed help. And so I went to him, and that is what the catalyst was for me getting arrested and Lyle. Eric had confessed the killings to Dr. O'Ziel.

Dr. O'Zill then went on to tape further conversations with Eric and Lyle and asked them details about the killings so he could get on tape their confessions. He told his lover, Judilon Smith, that if anything were to happen to him, the tapes are in the lockbox, go and get them and give them to police, and they'll know what happened. She's the one that came to the police and said, I have information about this O'Zeel, who, parenthetically, is the psychologist for Eric and Lyle Mnandez. They didn't talk about shooting the father a whole lot.

They did talk that they had to keep shooting the mother. Eric filled Dr. O'Zill in on many details about what had happened, including where they bought the shotguns. And ABC News has learned that two 12-gauge shotguns were purchased at this sporting goods story. in San Diego on August 18th, two days before the murders. And the following day is when we got warrants to recover these tapes and arrested Lyle. I couldn't believe it. The family was on the phone to each other.

We were talking back and forth. How could this possibly be? The glow of innocence once surrounding the Menendez brothers is now shadowed by charges of murder. I thought the whole time it was done by the mafia, I did not believe that it was the brothers. Prosecutors say greed drove the boys to shooting their parents to death last August.

$14 million provides ample motive to some people to commit murder. To me, it was like a nightmare, like a movie, like it couldn't be reality. When somebody does something that horrible and you put it on television, there's a lynch mob mentality around Somebody commits a murder. We want justice.

We want blood justice fast. The Menendez Brothers trial was really the first big trial I covered, and it was a spectacle. It's like the crowds in the Roman Coliseum, you know, blood. They smell blood. When I first saw Eric Menendez walk into the courtroom, my blood went cold because I had never seen. someone who had murdered his parents before

and it really was the Menendez case and it was complex and they said they did it because they'd been sexually abused so the question the question in the trial if you believe that they were sexually abused does that lessen their responsibility for murder it will be your job

to decide what kind of killing this is that depends on what you come to believe was the reason for the act The only question in this case is why did these killings occur? I didn't buy it at the start at all. I thought it was a total artificial construct, a gambit by a desperate defense, to do something to save these guys from the death penalty.

It will become apparent that this murder was unjustified and wholly premeditated and that it was accomplished through a conspiracy into which Lyle Menendez entered with his brother. And that but for a few mistakes they made, this was almost the perfect murder. I knew that we could prove that the Menendez brothers killed their parents. But I also started thinking about, okay, let's say I'm a sleazy defense lawyer and I'm going to make up a defense. What defense would I make up? And I said, I think they're going to fabricate a sexual abuse defense because I can't think of any other reason why we're going to trial. And guess what? They did.

Eric Menendez was the abused son of wealthy parents. Leslie Abramson was one of the most unpleasant people I've ever had to cover, and yet I admired her because she was ferocious for her client. Not her clients. It was Eric, who was her client. He killed his parents because he could no longer endure their abuse and had to stop it. We never argued that child abuse is an excuse to murder. What we argue is child abuse creates a terrible feeling.

This is not a child abuse trial, this is a murder trial. Her reputation in the legal community was that she was a fighter who would go to the mat for her clients. But in the prosecutor's office, everyone told me, watch out for her. She will lie, cheat, and steal to win. The origin of this killing was a lifetime of abuse at the hands of those same parents. I think the strongest piece of evidence that we had, and certainly the most compelling for a prosecutor, were the crime scene photos and the way that they killed their parents. This is her before and this is her after.

And the problem for the defendants in this case is they can't explain adequately killing mom. They just can't do it. And I'd like you to look at those photographs and ask yourself... The prosecutors did a great job of portraying these two brothers who were clearly plotting a premeditated murder and taking apart their story piece by piece. I also noticed that there was a large portion of at the back of his head was missing. Why?

It ejects the round of ammunition. Did you ask them why they killed their mother? They felt that they were putting the mother out of her misery. It ripped apart their stories and made them seem like petty liars covering up an appalling homicide. He came home and saw him two shot. You were crying, correct?

Right. And at the same time, you were lying while you were crying. Is that correct? Right. I think there was a near universal sense that this was going to be a sham defense and that it was going to be a joke. And then they got on the witness stands. What did you think was going to happen?

I thought they were going ahead with their plan to kill us. I was just sitting on the couch with my hands in my head saying, we're going to die. We're going to die. I can't believe this. Their story was that they were afraid of their parents, afraid that their parents were going to kill them. I mean, you're familiar with kids saying, oh, my father's going to kill me. Oh, my parents are going to kill me. Is that what you're talking about?

No, no. I, Dad was going to kill us. I could not conceive of these strapping young men being in such terror. They had to kill their parents out of fear, so I didn't buy it. But they definitely needed that piece in order to get the self-defense claim. We fired lots, you know, many, many times, and there were just glass, and you could hear things breaking, and you could hear the ringing noises from the booms, and it was the smoke from the guns. We learned that they went after Kitty in the most horrible way, that they reloaded, and they came back to finish her off, and that they still shot her. And Joe was shot so much so that he, I learned he was decapitated. Now, after you entered the den, I was just firing as I went into the room, I just started firing.

In what direction? In front of me. What was in front of you? My parents. Eric testified she got up to run, and there was blood on the bottom of her shoe inside the tread of her heads. And I think of, I think of her, and I think of, she got up and ran because her kids. Kids came in with shotguns and started shooting. I cannot imagine.

I mean, I just can't imagine anything like that. It's just so horrific. Did you fire at the second figure? Did you fire at the first figure? Do you know if you fired at both? Off to his one? I don't know. I just walked into the room.

I just started firing, and I don't know. I didn't think about these things. I didn't think, where was this, where was that? I just started firing. I remember my dad coming forward. in my direction so he was standing and I remember

firing directly at him I believe he fell back now what was it that happened after the shooting ended I heard a noise from my mom and what was your reaction to that noise I just ran out of the room and what did you do after you reloaded

I ran around and shot my mom. Where did you shoot her? The street storm, I shot her close. I thought that when Lyle described the killing of his mother, that a normal jury would find it reprehensible and convict him. You know, we loved our mother. Oh, yeah, really? You loved her mother?

You blew her up. The prosecution was completely focused on the idea that Eric and Lyle Menendez were greedy rich kids that had killed their parents because they were in a hurry to inherit their money. Why did you need to buy a Rolex watch four days after your parents were killed? I didn't need to.

You wanted to? Well, what happened that day is that I was... My uncles had talked to my brother and I think it was mainly my brother needed to get suits for the memorial service in L.A. that was coming up and also for the one that they were planning down New Jersey. So you just thought a $9,000, 18-carat gold Rolex would go nicely with your funeral suit. Is that right? And I thought that that was a very powerful part of the prosecution case. It persuaded me

at the, I mean, I didn't think they were in fear for their lives. I didn't. I thought they were trying to get away with murder. Why they were murdering is what the question was. Mr. Menendez, you've heard the testimony of your brother that you and he killed your parents on August 20th, 1989. Did you not? Yes, we did. Trials are storytelling competitions. What do you believe was the originating cause of you and your brother ultimately winding up, shooting your parents? So whoever tells the better story in a trial that's anchored in the facts as they come out,

that's who's going to persuade the jury. Me telling. You telling what? Me telling Lyle that, uh... You telling Lyle what? And to do that, you don't just say, this happened, this happened, this happened, this happened, this happened, this happened. He said, here's this person. This is what their experience was.

This is what they did, and this is why. Ronan, can I ask the leading question? If you don't ask... My dad... Wait, one second, it was okay, let me ask him. No, no, he was in the process of answering, so there was no need to ask him. Can you answer the question? Yes.

Okay, was you telling Lyle what? My dad had been less than me. Tell me Lies. with an all-new season. I'm willing to forgive you after everything you've done. Everything I've done? What about everything you've done? On January 13th.

Every single time you try to make something better, you end up making it so much worse. Every betrayal. Why are you doing this? Has consequences. Because I want to hurt you, and I don't know how else to do it. Tell me lies.

New season, January 13th. Streaming on Hulu and for bundle subscribers on Disney Plus. Terms apply. You could hear a pin drop in the course. courtroom. And that's when I thought, oh, darn, I'm in trouble. Television removes you from the intimacy of pain. To my dismay, the Menendez Brothers Trial became a gag on Saturday Night Live. Would you please state your names for the record? Lyle Menendez? Eric Menendez.

became a game show because it was on television. Can you tell the court who did murder your parents? Our other two brothers, Danny Menendez and Jose Menendez Jr. And they became cartoons in the public mind. Right, with sweaters and the tears and all that stuff. It was easy for people to dismiss what they were claiming as an act. The first thing they did is they always dressed in pastels. And they always wear the little crew neck, Ralph Warren's sweaters, and the little polo shirts underneath, to make them look like little Easter egg candies.

They were referred to all the time as the boys, not the brothers, not the adults, because they were adults, the boys, the boys. The boys, the boys, the boys. And it got to the point where I was saying the boys, because it's a shorth of the dirtbags over there who killed their parents. For 12 years, between the ages of 6 and 18, my client, Eric Menendez, was sexually molested by his father. The sex abuse defense, the abuse excuse, was new in the law. And so people were very, very skeptical of it. Sex abuse takes place in private. How can you prove it?

Who witnesses it? The greatest omission that occurred for the Menendez brothers in terms of whether this happened or not. was their failure to tell this to their own psychotherapist. When Eric Menendez was 10 years old, he told his cousin Andy Cano that he'd been sexually molested by his father. Well, he told me his father was massaging his . Did he use that word? Yes, he did.

He wanted to know that this happened to every kid. I do remember very specifically was him asking me to make a promise to him, never to reveal that to anybody. It's hard to explain that away, and then when their own testimony came in it was very, very powerful. And between the ages of six and eight, did your father have sexual contact with you? Yes. And how did it start? We would have these talks, and he would fondle me, and he would ask me to do the same with him, and I would touch him.

I would touch him and we would undress. When Lyle appeared, it was a turning point because now you were hearing a whole different side of the story and details that no one had ever really heard before. We would be in the bathroom and it would, he would put me on my knees and he would guide me all my movements and I would have oral sex with them. The days that Lyle and Eric Menendez testified

to their claims of sexual abuse are among the most unforgettable days I've ever had as a journalist. What else did he do to you? He used that. Objects. What kind of objects? A toothbrush and some sort of shaving utensil brush. And did he try to anally penetrate you with something else?

Who did? And what was it? It... He braved me. There was a level of detail that people people remember from real life that you almost wouldn't kind of make up. Did you tell your brother? No.

Did you do something to your brother? Yes. What did you do to your brother? I took him out to the woods. Whenever I felt, I don't know, I took him out sometimes, and I took a toothbrush also, and I played with Eric in the same way. And I'm sorry. And he says with such shame, but what is even more convincing,

more convincing, and I was sitting about 10 feet from Eric, is I saw this vein start popping out of his forehead as he hears his brother apologizing, as their own secret horrible sordidness comes out into public on television. Were you scared? Barry. Did you ask him not to?

Yes. How did you ask him not to him? I just told him. I don't... I don't... I just told them that I didn't... I just told them that I didn't want to do this. And that it hurt me. And he said he didn't mean to hurt me.

And he loved me. People in the audience were crying. Press members were crying. They were dabbing at their eyes. They hear everything. They were crying. Frankly, I think they're bad acting when they're trying to convince everybody

that they were actually in fear for their lives when they killed their parents. shows that they weren't pretending when they were casting themselves back to their experiences as little boys and being raped. Did you have some hope over that summer of 1989

for some improvement in your life? Yes. And what did you expect? I was going to go to college. How significant a notion was this? It was the most important thing in my life. It was everything in my life. It was all I thought about.

Why was it all you thought about? Why was it all I thought about? Yeah. Because it would end with sex, and that's all I thought about. How did you feel at 18 about the fact that your father was having sex with you? I hated it. I hated it. I hated it.

You slept in bed with your mom a lot, didn't you, even when you were little? Yes. And did you continue to sleep in her bed around this time when you're 11? seven and twelve sometimes and sometimes did you touch your mom yes and where would you touch it everywhere the idea that Eric and Lyell were abused by my sister Kitty this absolute insanity I thought that was pretty gratuitous and just thrown in as an example of how awful the parents were, that a kiddie deserved to die too, because she was complicit.

Because the problem, from their point of view, was Jose was a jerk, but what do you do with the mother? If he hadn't have killed his mom, I always think that he might have got away with them. Because mother would have stood by you. She would have stuck up for you to save your life. Killing your parents is really a violation of the basic bedrock fact of social authority.

authority. Honor thy mother and father. I actually think that some of the revulsion against them was, it's an unnatural act, and it is an act that threatens the very fabric of society. The whole abuse excuse was a lie. I don't think children kill their parents willy-nilly. I compare a closing argument in a high-profile case to Game 7 in a World Series. There's an electricity that's literally floating in the air. It is unbelievably exciting. You heard about some of the things that he liked to do to his little boy. This is not a hard case at all.

This is what happened. These two people were sitting there watching television, and they got slaughtered by their sons. And one of them was to stick tacks like this, in his thighs and in his butt. At the end of the day, this trial came down to, Did You Believe Them? I remember thinking he's either the best actor in the world. or this is a true story. These two terrorist parents built two bombs that blew up and killed them. It became like a war shock test.

You looked at Lyle Menendez, Eric Menendez. You either saw cynical, sinister, vicious killers, or you saw victims. I mean, this is a jury trial. It's only going to take one juror to hang this up. hang this up can we get all 12 the court declares a mistrial yeah that completes this hearing jurors have told the jury they are unable to reach a verdict hopelessly deadlocked the general public was screaming on talk radio they said the brothers admitted they did it

what's wrong with those jurors what's wrong with this judge why couldn't they get a conviction we are going to be trying the case a second time round two second time around with this case It was a different ballgame for a lot of reasons. Number one, the judge banned cameras in the courtroom. And the judge, to some degree, said, certain defense evidence, I'm just not going to allow it. So he reversed all this evidence rulings, and the jurors never heard anything about the family history.

And several jurors that I interviewed after the second trial told me, if they had heard that family history, they never would have voted for murder. There were a lot of people who donated their time and their expertise for free to the retrial in the Menendez case, because people were so outraged, at the jury at the jury hanging at the end of the first trial the menendez family was broke and in the second trial both the brothers had their attorneys fees paid for by the people of

the state of california i knew they were going to get convicted the second time around because of the outrage around the first trial i thought look good luck getting away with it now Lyle and eric menendez have been found guilty of murdering their parents it took a second trial for the two to be convicted of murder in the first degree the brothers barely reacted both slumped a little Eric looked at a relative to say it will be okay and exchanged looks with his brother. We believe that most people in this county, perhaps even in this country, now believe that there was justice in this case. I thought that justice had been done in a legal sense, because I do think that they, obviously, they killed their parents and they failed to prove that they were in fear for their lives and therefore justified in doing so. But I thought that the fact they'd become laughing stocks around their claim of sexual abuse was an injustice, a moral injustice.

What went through your minds when you heard that verdict, first degree murder, guilty? That I was going to spend the rest of my life in prison without any possibility of ever getting released. Some people might say they should be punished as much as possible. What do you say to that? We will spend the rest of our life in prison. If we're not put in the same prison, there's a good probability I will never see him again. Some things that you cannot take,

and there's some things that you can endure with everything taken away, it's the last thing you can take. And that would be very difficult to live. Eric and Lyell Menendez were 18 and 21 at the time that they killed their parents. At the height of the interest in the trial, both Eric and Lyle Menendez were receiving over a thousand letters a week from people from all over the world. And they developed close friendships with the two women that they married.

Why on earth would you change your whole life for Eric Menendez? He's the most sensitive kind. I mean, he's just, he's always there for me. He worries, you know, I never had that before. You realize, with all due respect, that a lot of people think you're nuts? Oh, yes. I've heard it before many times. If I just say to you, why?

What do you say? My answer to that is I fell in love with him unexpectedly, and it's quite a long journey that led me to there. Have you ever had sex with Eric? No. We can hug and kiss on the way out and hold hands during the visit. And the holding of the hands during the visit is everything. I can't offer her most of the things that another husband can in terms of being with her physically. What I can offer her is unconditional and complete devotion in love.

She is everything to me. Lyle Menendez developed a friendship with a woman named Anna Erickson. I hope that we can get married someday soon. Even though it's a very limited relationship because of where we are, the exchange of love and sharing, it keeps you in touch with yourself and softer. Otherwise, you can become very hard and cold in here. Someday it might be possible for you to have children.

Do you want to? I would very much like to have a family. I would feel concerned for the pressures that would be on children having a... Eric, it's a father, but an opportunity to give differently and give them love and just sort of maybe it's a way of trying to correct some of the things that happened to us, I don't know. The marriage lasted about a year, and then Lyominen is married a second time to a woman who had been a pen pal, and they have a very close bond.

One thing I've learned is that your physical... comfort is much less important than your connection with the people around you and in your life that are important to. I found I can have a healthy marriage that is complicated and built around conversation and finding creative ways to communicate and sharing without any of the props that are normally in marriage. Last October, my 14-year-old son came to me one after. and said, Dad, you have to come take a look at these videos. TikTok is full of Menendez brothers' videos.

Even after all these years, I still don't understand why a Lyle and an Eric could have done that. Something happened during the course of their childhood that turned them into murderers. You cannot escape those memories. Those ghosts, they never leave you. They always haunt you. There's a part of me that says, you know, I need to get past my childhood.

No matter how painful it is, it's just part of the fabric of who I am. I have thought since the trial that if the Menendez brothers were the Menendez sisters, they would be free today. We don't want to think, oh, boys get raped by their father. So that's why people are just so outraged, because they were treated like this was impossible. Like, this was the narrative. That's why people are just angry. That is not okay. I think society has evolved a great deal in the past 27 years.

People are aware that these things do happen within families. I would say people of my generation predominantly believe that it wasn't active self-revelled. that these boys were horribly used. I think they're seen as the victims of a less enlightened time. It's a moral crusade. It's an attempt to write a wrong. I don't believe they got a fair trial. This case is so deep and complex that they don't deserve to live the rest of their life in prison.

You've seen social media campaigns to get certain people freed from jail that have been successful. I think they've gone there enough, and it's time that they come home. They envision a future where their brothers are not in jail, and they do see that as within their capacity to somehow affect that. I think this is a positive trend in the sense that we should always be re-examining our systems, but I also think it can be a little bit dangerous. When you have somebody that is a convicted criminal that develops a fan base online, sometimes that fan base can be blind to their crimes and the harms that they've caused.

So I think that's where the danger comes in. This call and your telephone number will be monitored and record. Prison is not a relaxed environment. You feel the loss of freedom deeply. But I feel like there's a lot of purpose. There's still a lot of purpose in life, even in confinement if you want it. I've pretty much just poured my energies into helping quality of life here, helping people with their rehabilitation goals.

Both Eric and Lyle Menendez have become contributing members of their prison community. I'm a morally formed adult now. It seems unimaginable because this seems so far removed from who I am and who I was. I don't know how some people survive it better than others. To a degree I don't feel like I did. I mean, is there that much difference to a kid who goes through that taking suicide or kills his parent and ends up doing life in prison? It's a failed destructive ending. It's part of the jazz evidence.

It could so easily have not have happened. You've been listening to the 2020 True Crime Vault. Friday nights at 9 on ABC, you can also find all new broadcast episodes of 2020. Thanks for listening.