Case File: Menendez Brothers

José Menendez was a high-powered music executive who rose through the ranks of a cutthroat industry to represent such famous acts as the Eurythmics, Duran Duran and the boy band Menudo. He met his future wife Kitty at Southern Illinois University, which he attended on a swimming scholarship. The couple married and had two sons: Lyle, born in 1968, and Erik, born in 1970.

Despite their affluence, the Menendez brothers committed several crimes as youths. In the 1980s, while living in Calabasas, Calif., the teenage brothers came to the attention of law enforcement when it was discovered that they were burglarizing their friends’ homes, stealing as much as $100,000 worth of jewels, cash and other valuables.

The brothers’ felonies were lightly punished, but they caused the embarrassed family to move out of Calabasas into a new residence on Elm Drive in Beverly Hills. The home—with a swimming pool, tennis court and spacious guesthouse—had previously been rented to Elton John, Prince and other luminaries.

Around the same time period, Erik and a friend collaborated on a movie screenplay in which a young man kills both of his wealthy parents to inherit their fortune. Lyle, meanwhile, was suspended from Princeton University for plagiarism and other transgressions; he later returned to California to attend the University of California, Irvine, which Erik also attended.

Though Kitty seemed to revel in her role as a doting mother who attended all her sons’ soccer and tennis matches, José was growing less patient with their spoiled-rich-kids behavior. He reportedly threatened to cut the pair out of his will, and Kitty complained to her therapist that she was concerned about her sons’ "narcissism." By August 1989, tensions within the family were palpable, according to people who knew them.

On August 20, 1989, José and Kitty Menendez settled into their television room to watch the James Bond thriller The Spy Who Loved Me. 

Unbeknownst to the couple, two days earlier, Lyle and Erik had purchased two 12-gauge shotguns and ammunition at a San Diego sporting goods store. Erik bought the weapons using a stolen driver’s license as identification.

That night, the brothers entered the television room with their shotguns loaded and began firing on both José and Kitty Menendez. José was shot six times, including a shot to the back of his head. Kitty was shot multiple times, but managed to crawl away from her sons.

Erik and Lyle ran out to their car to reload, then returned to finish off their mother with a shot to her left cheek that shattered her skull. A police investigator would later say, "I've seen a lot of homicides, but nothing quite that brutal. Blood, flesh, skulls. It would be hard to describe, especially José, as resembling a human that you would recognize. That's how bad it was."

The brothers then drove up to Mulholland Drive—a twisting road that overlooks Los Angeles—where they buried their shotguns before disposing of their blood-splattered clothes at a gas station. They then drove to a theater to buy tickets for a movie as an alibi, a plan they scuttled because of the timestamp on the tickets.

At 11:47 p.m. that night, the Beverly Hills Police Department received a 911 call from a distraught Lyle, who said “someone killed my parents.” When police showed up, the brothers told police they suspected a Mafia hit due to their father’s business dealings. Because they were not considered suspects at the time, the police did not conduct gunshot residue tests on Erik or Lyle.

Within a few days, the brothers began an orgy of spending on flashy luxury items, using money from a life insurance policy: They splurged on Rolex watches, a Porsche Carrera sports car, designer clothes, condominiums in Marina del Rey, a Jeep Wrangler and international trips.

The brothers’ extravagant spending aroused the suspicion of police detectives, who also noticed how little interest the duo showed in finding their parents’ killers. Investigators struggled for months, however, to find any hard evidence that the young men were responsible for their parents’ deaths.

All that changed when a woman named Judalon Smyth contacted the police with information about a confession. Smyth was the former mistress of Jerome Oziel, a psychologist whom Erik started seeing as required by his probation following the brothers’ Calabasas burglaries.

Smyth revealed to police that she overheard Erik and Lyle arguing about the double murder—and Erik confessing to the murder—through the door of Oziel’s office. She also told police that Oziel had tape recordings of the brothers’ psychology sessions, including Erik’s confession.

When the police recovered the tapes in Oziel’s safe-deposit box, the case was cracked wide open, and the two brothers were arrested in March 1990 and held without bail in Los Angeles County Jail.

Prior to the first of two trials, the brothers pleaded not guilty to shooting their parents. The information on the tapes from Oziel’s sessions was a critical part of the proceedings: The defense, led by celebrity attorney Leslie Abramson, insisted that the tapes were inadmissible because of patient-client confidentiality, while the prosecution noted that the tapes should be admissible because they included threats of violence.

After much legal wrangling, the Supreme Court of California decided in 1992 that most of the tapes were admissible in court. The brothers were indicted for first-degree murder for financial gain and for lying in wait for their victims, which made them eligible for the death penalty.

During the first trial, the two brothers were tried together but with two separate juries, one for each brother. There was, additionally, a bombshell admission: Both brothers stated that they had suffered years of psychological and sexual abuse from their father.

The first trial, which started in July 1993, received an unprecedented degree of publicity as it was aired nationwide on CourtTV. The brothers’ defense of “extreme emotional disturbance” caused by years of sexual abuse was also relatively new at the time.

In January 1994, after months of jury deliberations and testimony—including family members who testified that José had in fact sexually abused his sons—the two juries declared that they were both “hopelessly deadlocked.” As a result, a mistrial was declared.

During the second trial, which started in October 1995, both brothers were tried simultaneously with one jury. The judge strictly limited the amount of testimony regarding allegations of parental abuse.

Defense attorney Abramson emphasized that Lyle and Erik had killed their parents out of fear that they would be harmed for threatening to reveal the secret of Jose’s sexual abuse. But the “abuse excuse” failed to sway the judge or the jury, and in March 1996, the brothers were convicted of first-degree murder and were sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

Both brothers are currently serving their sentences in the Richard J. Donovan Correctional Facility near San Diego. In 1996, Lyle married Anna Eriksson by telephone, but the marriage ended in divorce in 2001. Lyle then married Rebecca Sneed; the couple separated in 2024.

Erik also said “I do” behind bars, marrying Tammi Saccoman in 1999 while he was incarcerated at Folsom State Prison, where they shared a Twinkie as their wedding cake. Saccoman has long advocated for the brothers’ release from prison.

The Menendez brothers filed numerous appeals that were denied until another bombshell dropped in April 2023: In a docuseries about the Menendezes, former Menudo performer Roy Rossello stated that he had been drugged and raped at age 14 by José.

This admission sparked renewed interest in the brothers’ conviction. After the brothers filed another appeal based on the new information, Los Angeles District Attorney George Gascon stated in 2024, "I do believe that the brothers were subjected to a tremendous amount of dysfunction in the home, and molestation,” warranting a review of their sentence.

In May 2025, after exhaustive political and legal maneuvering, a judge resentenced the brothers to 50 years to life, which made them eligible for parole. But in two separate hearings in August 2025, each brother was denied parole. They will be eligible to reapply for parole in 2028, or as early as 2027, with good behavior in prison.

During the 1990s, allegations of sexual abuse—especially those in which males sexually abused other males—were often dismissed without granting them the same degree of seriousness they are given today.

“As time has gone by, there has been more openness about talking about abuse in general and particularly abuse of boys,” Carlos Cuevas, Northeastern University professor of criminology and criminal justice, told Northeastern Global News.

The media frenzy surrounding the trials and the lengthy appeals process have also revealed the impact that media coverage of a sensational trial can impact the outcome of the trial. That impact caused the judge to ban courtroom cameras in the brothers’ second trial.

The Menendez brothers have been the subject of numerous media portrayals, including a 2024 Netflix series Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story, produced by Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan. The same year, the network also aired a documentary, The Menendez Brothers.