Crime Fix with Angenette Levy - Menendez Brother Calls Into CrimeCon As Bid For Freedom Moves Forward

Episode Date: June 7, 2024

Lyle Menendez, who's serving a life sentence for the murder of his parents along with his brother Erik, called into CrimeCon earlier this week leaving the audience shocked. Menendez called during a presentation by one of his lawyers, Mark Geragos, and NewsNation correspondent Laura Ingle. The Menendez brothers are asking to be released from prison claiming they have new evidence to support their claim that their father, Jose, sexually abused them and that their mother, Kitty, did nothing to stop it. Law&Crime's Angenette Levy goes through the phone call with Courtroom Confidential host Josh Ritter in this episode of Crime Fix — a daily show covering the biggest stories in crime.PLEASE SUPPORT THE SHOW: If you’ve ever been injured in an accident, you can check out Morgan & Morgan. You can submit a claim in 8 clicks or less without having to leave your couch. To start your claim, visit: https://www.forthepeople.com/YouTubeTakeoverHost:Angenette Levy  https://twitter.com/Angenette5Guest: Josh Ritter  https://x.com/JoshuaRitterESQCRIME FIX PRODUCTION:Head of Social Media, YouTube - Bobby SzokeSocial Media Management - Vanessa BeinVideo Editing - Daniel CamachoAudio Editing - Brad MaybeGuest Booking - Alyssa Fisher & Diane KayeSTAY UP-TO-DATE WITH THE LAW&CRIME NETWORK:Watch Law&Crime Network on YouTubeTV: https://bit.ly/3td2e3yWhere To Watch Law&Crime Network: https://bit.ly/3akxLK5Sign Up For Law&Crime's Daily Newsletter: https://bit.ly/LawandCrimeNewsletterRead Fascinating Articles From Law&Crime Network: https://bit.ly/3td2IqoLAW&CRIME NETWORK SOCIAL MEDIA:Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lawandcrime/Twitter: https://twitter.com/LawCrimeNetworkFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/lawandcrimeTwitch: https://www.twitch.tv/lawandcrimenetworkTikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@LawandCrimeSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Wondery Plus subscribers can binge all episodes of this Law and Crimes series ad-free right now. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify. It is important. I do have a call here. A phone call from prison on stage at CrimeCon. To accept this call, say or dial 5 now. Thank you for using Global Telelink. Lyle. Hi, Mark. How are you? Convicted murderer Lyle Menendez calls in during a live presentation with his lawyer, Mark Garagas,

and News Nation correspondent, Laura Engel. I have details from the call that shocked the audience, and I look at whether it will end up helping Menendez and his brother Eric as they try to get out of prison, where they're serving life sentences for killing their parents. Thanks for joining me for Crime Fix. I'm Anjanette Levy. Well, I was at CrimeCon last weekend sitting in the audience for this presentation when Mark Garagas said he was expecting a call. And so we knew that someone was going to call. That wasn't a big shock. It could have been Scott Peterson, but that was highly unlikely. We knew that. He doesn't really call places. So it had to be the Menendez brothers, at least one of them. And it was. Lyle Menendez called in on Mark Garagas' cell phone.

Lyle? Hi, Mark. How are you? I'm doing very well, thank you. his cell phone. I'll get to more of the call in a bit, but first, I just want to bring you up to speed on the case if you're not familiar with it. Lyle and Eric Menendez are both surveying sentences of life in prison without the possibility of parole for the murders of their parents, Jose and Kitty Menendez, in 1989. Lyle and Eric killed their parents at their home in Beverly Hills. They claimed that burglars had killed their parents. Kitty and Jose were shot to death with a shotgun. Prosecutors said at the time that Lyle and Eric went on a spending spree and were after their parents' money. They were arrested and charged with the murders in 1990, months after the killings. The first trial in 1992 ended in a hung jury.

At the first trial, they claimed that they were sexually abused by their father, Jose, and that their mother, Kitty, did nothing to stop it. They also claimed they were physically abused. Prosecutors argued the whole thing was a lie. They diminished the abuse and we called it the abuse excuse. That was Mark Garagas talking with me about the case last year. The second trial was a little different. Some of the testimony backing up the abuse claims was not allowed. The Menendez's had always claimed the killings were imperfect self-defense and they were guilty of manslaughter because of the abuse, not murder. And let me tell you, there was no bigger trial in the 1990s

than the trials of the Menendez brothers, except, of course, for the trial of O.J. Simpson. Both Lyle and Eric were found guilty at the second trial and received sentences of life in prison without parole. So fast forward to last year. The Menendez brothers filed a petition for release. It's called a writ of habeas corpus. The brothers claimed new evidence had been uncovered backing up their claims that Jose sexually abused Eric. It was a letter written by Eric and sent to his cousin eight months before the shooting.

Part of it reads, I've been trying to avoid dad. It's still happening, Andy, but it's worse for me now. I can't explain it. He's so overweight that I can't stand to see him. I never know when it's going to happen, and it's driving me crazy. Every night I stay up thinking he might come in. The cousin, Andy Kano, is now dead, but had testified at the first trial. He wasn't allowed to testify in the second trial. I want to take a moment to thank

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you can start your claim at www.forthepeople.com slash YouTube takeover or by dialing pound law. That's pound 529 on your phone. There's something else too, but first here's what happened when Lyle Menendez called into CrimeCon the other day. Mark Garagas was talking about the Scott Peterson case, but that changed very quickly. And ladies and gentlemen, this is Lyle Menendez, who is calling in as kind of a... Lyle, I thought it was important that at a place like CrimeCon, where people have obviously got an interest in your case and Eric's case and that we're pending a habeas corpus right now in California. One of the things that I thought was interesting, people talk about your case, and we've got a number of minutes, I think,

but we're being recorded, ladies and gentlemen, so you understand. So one of the things, you've been in custody now, what, almost 35 years? That's correct, yes. Okay. And you're now, how long has it been that you and Eric are at the same location? About seven years now. Wow. And you've basically been there since 2005, since your last appeal, without any hopes of ever getting out. Is that a fair statement?

Right. Okay. A life sentence. So I'm not going to lie. I knew this was coming. Did I know it was Lyle? No, but I knew something was coming. I had heard about it that morning. The crowd, though, was pretty shocked. This isn't something you see every day. A high-profile inmate calling into a convention about crime cases where there's an emphasis placed on victims. Lyle and Eric, as you've heard, have been in the same prison for about seven years. They've been locked up now for about 35 years. They really don't have any hope that they'll ever be released. Garrigas then asked Lyle Menendez to talk about what he's been doing in prison. Sure. So doing life without, I had a choice of just sort of sit around and watch. This call and your telephone number will be monitored and recorded. You know, maybe you find yourself getting into trouble or just doing nothing productive with your time.

And I just wanted to do something more than that. And so I wanted to try to see if I could be part of this movement, this solution to rehabilitate prisoners. It started about 15 years ago, California Corrections, and I think the whole country realized that this sort of punishment model of corrections, treating prisoners as should be just punishment, was just causing prisoners to parole, commit more crimes, not adjust to society, come right back. So both the taxpayer and just sort of criminal rights groups felt like, and even victims' rights groups felt like we had to do something different. So they started education programs and classroom programs to try to change guys' lives

so that they could become better neighbors and succeed. And the problem was that the prisoners were struggling. In my lived experience here, I found that one of the reasons they were struggling is that their physical living environment was sending them a very opposite message. The way they had constructed these prisons and the yards was so harsh and oppressive that it was sending them a message that they were irredeemable, and these classroom lessons were not really real. They shouldn't buy into that. So I got together, formed a group, and trees and outside classroom areas and walkways. And not to make prison more fun and less a sentence, but to create a sense of community so that prisoners could learn to function in a sense of community, almost like a campus, and that they might be more open to changing their life.

And those principles are kind of well-founded in Europe and Norway. Norway kind of leads the way in that regard. And so for the first time, we're going to be doing that in a prison yard in California, and we've sort of already begun. It's all paid for through outside funding, public funding. So Lyle Menendez says he's doing something to give other inmates hope about being released one day, and he's also doing something to better himself. So I have a question for you, and it's kind of a, I know it's almost like an infomercial. But the habeas corpus that I filed with Cliff Gardner, my trusty appellate guru, was about a year ago.

Is that right? One year. That's just about a year ago. It did kind of feel a little bit like an infomercial, but back to the clip. You've started the Green Space Project. You're now going to graduate with a degree this month why would you do any of that um if you were an elwha prisoner with no chance of getting out well i just it's something i felt like, you know, that every day counts. And I just felt like I had to make a decision.

You know, life sort of asks you a question. What are you going to do with your life? You know, and I just decided, even though I'm incarcerated and there isn't hope of freedom, I still have a chance to be a productive person and sort of feel like I'm proud of what I'm doing with my day. And so education seems like an obvious answer to that question. And then doing something with that education and doing something with that time. I was accepted. Getting this bachelor's allowed me to apply and get accepted to a really rare master's program at California State

University. So they're getting a master's in urban planning, which fits well with what I'm trying to do on the prison yards. And I don't know, it makes all of my elderly aunts very happy. So there's that. And it's productive. So I'm enjoying it. Now, I mentioned earlier that the Menendez brothers claim there's other evidence that backs up their claims that they were sexually abused. It includes a claim from a guy named Roy Rosello, a member of the popular 1980s boy band Menudo.

He came forward to say that Jose Menendez raped him as a child. Menudo was represented by RCA Records where Jose was an executive. Who is your Aunt Joan? Joan is my mother's sister. Okay. And she's your mom's older sister, correct? Correct.

Okay. Aunt Joan did a, I don't know, most people don't know this. We did what's called a conditional examination. How long ago was this? Within the last 120 days? Yeah. Yeah. And Aunt Joan, who was Kitty's older sister, because she's over 90 years old, technically it's over 70, I think, in California, you can do in a criminal case what's called a conditional

examination, which is basically a deposition. So we did it at my office. The district attorney was represented. She spent an hour and a half talking about why she believes that her nephew's nephews should be out, that they've done enough time, that they have truly remarkable transformations. It brought tears to my eyes, I'll tell you, because the level of forgiveness, understanding, and just mercy, I think, was mind-boggling to me. And she still wakes up every day, if I'm not mistaken, you can correct me if I'm wrong, with her most fervent wish is for you and your brother to visit her up the 101 highway where she lives from where you two are staying. Is that fair? Right. Right.

You know, one of the other things people don't know is we now have, and we will be filing very shortly, a letter that's signed by how many relatives of Kitty and your father? 24? I think it was about, right him and Eric being released from prison. Does that matter? I don't know. They were sentenced to life in prison without parole. Will the family supporting them matter? Only time will tell. But this is what one of the prosecutors on the case told Fox Nation earlier this year. I put on the fact that these two yahoos killed their parents.

And I put on the fact that they killed them in cold blood with premeditation. The facts in this case are irrefutable, except for the ones about Jose being a child molester, which I still, to this day, after 34 years of thinking about it, I don't buy it. But not at all. Let me say this. I did a preliminary hearing with Leslie Abramson five years before this case. And in it, she was saying that her client was in fact a victim of domestic abuse. But as soon as she came on the case, I know, oh, okay, she's going to turn them into victims because that was her M.O. So she's not buying it. I also reached out to the current L.A. district attorney and so far haven't received a response to my request for comment about the habeas petition and about what happened at CrimeCon. So joining me to discuss this crazy thing that happened at CrimeCon over the weekend is Josh Ritter.

He's a former prosecutor in L.A., also a defense attorney, and he's followed the Menendez brothers case very closely. He was even in a Fox Nation documentary about it. So Josh, you and I are sitting in the audience and Lyle Menendez calls into this session on Mark Garagas' cell phone. What were you thinking? Yeah, it was absolutely wild. He had kind of teased it ahead of time saying he was expecting a phone call, but when it actually happened, I've never seen something like that at a conference, let alone it's being video recorded and everything else. But it was pretty incredible. He had quite an extensive conversation with him while he was in custody, and we could hear

throughout the call us being reminded that the call was being recorded by the Department of Corrections. Yeah, they always have that recording on the jail calls and prison calls like, this is a call from an inmate. And he's holding up the phone like this. And Lyle's talking about how he's getting his master's degree. And he has this project he's working on in prison. Lyle and Eric Menendez, it was a different time. You and I have talked about this many times. I mean, it was the 90s, but it was still a horrific crime. I mean, they claim they were sexually abused by their dad

and that their mom was complicit, didn't do anything about it. But they murdered their parents and then went on a spending spree. And now it's decades later, they're serving life in prison without the possibility of parole. And they're saying, well, but our family says we should get out, so we should get out. I mean, would that be unprecedented to get LWOP? And then just because people on both sides of your family say they've done enough time, they just open the prison doors and they're like, okay, yeah, it's fine. You've done enough time and you've gone to your room and you thought about what you did.

You can get out now. It would be absolutely unprecedented. And I don't think the courts are going to entertain it on those grounds. You're right. No one gets to years down the line, decide that they've served enough time or that their family or even the families of the victims say, I believe they've served enough time. But their argument's slightly more nuanced. It's definitely a PR push. I mean, let's put it any other way. You know, Gergo's taking the call during CrimeCon, this letter being signed by all the family members. There's definitely a

publicity element to all of this. But essentially, they're trying to make the argument that they were denied a certain defense, which, by the way, their argument has some teeth in the sense that they're not saying we're not guilty. They're saying we're guilty, but we're guilty of something lesser than what we were convicted of, because we were denied that opportunity to present a defense which would have allowed jurors to have a voluntary manslaughter on the table and available to them or a second degree murder rather than what they were convicted of, which gives them no opportunity for any kind of parole. It's still a very long shot, but at least there's some merit legally behind it. And I think you make an important point there. I mean, they've always said that they did it. They just argued at trial that they were guilty of manslaughter and not murder because of the sexual abuse or whatever, you know, and other abuse that they said they were enduring.

But by this time, you know, they were in their later teenage years. So they had, I guess, the ability to get out of it, even though you might not feel emotionally or psychologically like you do have the ability to get out of it. But I think it is definitely a PR push. I mean, we've had the Fox Nation documentary come out. You were in it. Now this at a convention that really kind of focuses more on victims rather than the people who commit the crimes or the defendants. system. We should be focusing on justice and people's rights and things like that. But they are convicted. They're just saying to the courts, look, we were deprived of this ability to present this defense at our second trial, and we just think we should have been convicted of something lesser. So you do think there's an uphill battle here. I mean, they talked about, Mark Arragus

talked about how kitty her sister who's in her 90s has done this conditional examination with the da's office there in la and mark yaragas so they've interviewed her because she you know is elderly and who knows what could happen um at this stage in her life and she's basically said she thinks they should get out um do you see the da's office getting on board with this at all? Well, you made an excellent point earlier that we do live in very different times. If you remember during the trials of Eric and Lyle Melendez, the first time around during both trials, this defense of them being abused, sexually abused at the hands of their father was not only roundly

rejected it was mocked even to some extent in the media people just couldn't uh handle this they couldn't accept it and they thought it was just two really awful young men who were portrayed as just going after their family's money trying to get out of these horrible crimes. I think we live in a day and age now where we look at this differently. We certainly look at people, men, who are the victims of sexual assault very differently. And so I think what they're saying, and I think the argument, the best argument they have with the DA's office is, listen, they probably were not given a very fair shake back then as to how this might have been handled now. And just so everyone understands too, they're not asking through this recent court

petition to have a retrial. They're asking for a resentencing. So essentially they're asking for the DA's office to agree with them and that the court should resentence them to something like a manslaughter, which means they would get time served, which means no new trial, no further time. And if this is granted, they would be let out forthwith. But do you see the DA getting on board with this? George Gascon, I mean, he takes a lot of flak out there in LA for being soft on crime, but it sounds like they actually sat and listened to what Kitty's sister, Aunt Joan, had to say. So what do you think that means, if anything?

It's interesting because, like you said, it's almostogne, in his office view this being received by the public at large here in Los Angeles and across the country? And are people going to be sympathetic to the idea that they were not given this opportunity to make these arguments the first time around? Or are people still going to view this as a very heinous crime where they shotgun to death their two parents. And if they take a look at this and they decide in the abundance of justice and fairness, they should be resentenced. I think you could see really groundbreaking news and the fact that they might be released. Again, I think it's a long shot because it is an incredible thing, as you pointed out, to go from LWAP to all of a sudden released. But we are talking decades later. As was highlighted during that phone call,

they've done a lot of good while they've been in custody. And perhaps the public reception of all of this is ready for it. Garagus took some hits during the Q&A section of this. We don't have the video of that. But there were a couple of people who got up and asked questions and hit him pretty hard on this issue. I mean, were you surprised by that? I think one of the things that people like to highlight when this argument is made is that the mother was also killed. And Geragos tried to show how the mother may have been complicit in some of all of this. But those crimes themselves were so awful in that everyone talks about how they were eating ice cream and just watching TV at the time. It wasn't like this was in the midst of abuse, that they had to reload their weapons, that they killed their mother in addition to their father, who was the subject of all of this abuse.

So when you really begin to analyze the case as it occurred and as we all received it at the time it occurred, it is really horrible. And I don't think anyone back then would ever imagine a circumstance where they would be talking about even being released now. So it is true that once you bring this case up, it's one of those cases that you're going to get a lot of people on both sides who have very strong feelings about it. Josh Ritter, host of Courtroom Confidential on YouTube, thanks so much for coming on.

Thank you for having me. And that's it for this episode of Crime Fix. I'm Ian Jeanette Levy. Thanks so much for being with me. I'll see you back here next time.