Ray William Johnson: True Story Podcast - The Menendez Brothers Story

Episode Date: January 28, 2025

They killed their own parents, the story of the famous Menendez Brothers

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Oh! Marvel Studios The Fantastic Four First Steps, now streaming on Disney Plus, we did PG-13. What time is it, Ben? It's Clubber Time! So one night these two brothers bust into their parents living room and they're each holding a pew-poo. And they start blasting, blam, clam! And they unalive their own parents.

So the brothers, their names are Eric and Lyle and they're 18 and 21. And these two are living the dream. They live in Beverly Hills with their parents, their family is rich because their dad is some kind of Hollywood executive. But then one day, Eric and Lyle decide they've had enough of their parents. And they want to get rid of them for good. A few days later, their mom and dad, who we'll just call mom and dad, Mom and Dad are chilling in the living room watching TV. And suddenly, boom, Eric and Lyle bust into the room.

And they're holding shotguns, and they just start blasting. Like, blam, blam, they shoot Dad six times. Blam, they shoot Mom ten times. And Dad dies immediately, but Mom, she's still alive. But she's hurt, she's trying to crawl away. So the brothers run back outside to Eric's car, where the ammo is. And then they reload, and then Lyle shoots Mom one last time, and unalives her. The brothers then decide they need to cover their tracks. So they shoot mom and dad

both in the knee to make it look like a mafia hit. And then they pick up all the shell casing so they can get rid of them. And then they drive to a nearby movie theater and they buy two tickets to see Batman because seeing the movie is going to be their alibi. And after Batman, they return to the family home and that's when they call 911. And they tell the operator they had just come home from the movie theater and they found their parents there dead. Minutes later, police show up and Eric and Lyle tell them the same thing, that they just came home and found their parents there. And it works. Police believe them. I mean, in that moment, they have no reason to suspect them of any wrongdoing. In fact, police see that mom and dad had been shot in the

kneecaps, and they start thinking, well, maybe this was a mafia hit. So basically, the brothers have just successfully gotten away with murder. And I don't know if they're celebrating or what, but pretty quickly, they go out and with their dead dad's money, they start spending like crazy. They buy a couple of luxury condos, a Jeep Wrangler, a Porsche, a Rolex, a Rolex. Eric hires a 50, thousand dollar a year tennis coach and Lyle buys a whole ass buffalo wings restaurant. So within six months the brothers had spent seven hundred thousand dollars of their dad's fortune. I mean from the looks of it things seem to be going pretty great for them. Until this guy tries to impress his girlfriend and he screws everything up.

We'll just call him Doc. Now Doc is a psychiatrist and one day he gets a little too close to one of his patients and they start smashing. We'll just call the patient mistress. Now Doc is married with kids, but he doesn't care. He just keeps on smashing with Mistress on the regular. Now Mistress isn't his only patient. Doc also has other patients, including one name Eric and another named Lyle. And Doc, he has regular therapy sessions with both Eric and Lyle.

And one day in one of those sessions, Eric comes out and tells Doc that he and Lyle had unalive their parents. And while Doc hears this and he continues to counsel them, he actually ends up tape recording one of their therapy sessions. So here's the thing about Doc. He apparently likes to flex. And when he's not at work, he likes to gossip about his patience to Mistress. And one day, he basically tells her, And by the way, those brothers in the news, Eric and Lyle,

they're my clients, and they totally unalived their parents. They told me so. And then months later, Doc and Mistress's affair ends. And their breakup is apparently ugly. Like, real ugly. Allegedly, he assaults her. So Mistress, she gets pissed off and she's like, this guy.

And she steals Doc's tail. tape recordings of his session with Eric and Lyle. And she takes them straight to the police because she wants to get Doc in trouble by accusing him of knowing about the murder, but not reporting it. So police listen to the tapes and they hear Eric and Lyle confessing to unaliving their parents. And they go out and they immediately arrest Lyle. While Eric turns himself in a few days later. So here's Eric's mugshot and here's Liles.

So now the brothers are in jail and they're charged with murder. And they might get the death penalty for this and this scares the shit out of them. So they sit in jail for three years before they finally get to go to trial. And there, the state argues that Eric and Lyle unalive their parents because they wanted to inherit their parents' fortune, which is why they were out spending all that money. But Eric and Lyle, they argue that they did it because their dad had subjected them to years of mental, physical, and sexual abuse.

And they argue that getting rid of their parents was the only way out of that toxic situation. It's sort of a self-defense argument. Now, this self-defense argument is important because it would give them a man manslaughter conviction instead of a murder conviction. And a manslaughter conviction would have a much lighter sentence. So six months later, both sides have made their argument and the trial ends.

And unfortunately, they end up with a hung jury. So it's a mistrial. Then a year and a half later, they go back to court to try again with a new jury. But this time, the judge doesn't allow the brothers to present the allegations of physical and sexual abuse to the jury, because of some legal precedent or something. Which means this time, the jury doesn't even have the option to convict victim of manslaughter instead of murder. So of course, then Eric and Lyle are both found guilty of

first-degree murder. And while lucky for them, they don't get the death penalty, they're both sentenced to life in prison without parole. But here's the crazy thing. 27 years later, a former member of the famous boy band, Minuto, he comes forward with new information. He claims that back in the 80s, when he was 14, he was also a victim of sexual abuse by Eric and Lyle's dad. Because remember, dad was a Hollywood executive, and he worked with Minuto at the time. And this accusation is important because it gives credibility to the brothers claim that their dad had been abusing them all those years. And if that's true, and if the brothers had proven in court that they had been abused by their dad, that would greatly strengthen their self-defense argument. And they would have gotten that manslaughter conviction

instead of that murder conviction. And they would be out of prison by now. So now, with this new evidence and some other evidence people found, Eric and Lyle are actively petitioning to get out of prison. But for now, they're still there. Here's Eric's updated mugshot, and here's Lyle's. So shout out to Beverly Hills.