Global Courant
Erik Menendez, left, and Lyle Menendez. (California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation via AP)
I haven’t given much thought to the Menendez brothers, Lyle and Erik, since they were convicted in 1996 of murdering their parents, Jose and Kitty, in their Beverly Hills mansion.
Lyle was 21 and Erik was 18 at the time of the murders.
The prosecution argued they were greedy, spoiled brats trying to get their hands on their parents’ fortunes. The defense argued that they had been severely abused by their father, who was enlisted by their mother, and that they feared for their lives.
The family’s horrific story was a chapter from a particularly traumatic era in Los Angeles, where the criminal justice system seemed to be at its limits, where controversies over systemic racism, privilege, domestic violence, and fairness raged through the airwaves, at dinner tables, and around water coolers.
I would go so far as to say that the 1990s in LA essentially started on the August night in 1989 when the Menendez brothers sneak up on their parents and blow them away with shotguns while the couple watched TV and ate ice cream. Six months later came the brothers, who had managed to spend it over $1 million of their parents’ money in the meantime, were under arrest.
A year later, George Holliday videotaped the brutal beating of motorist Rodney King by LAPD officers, and acquittal of the officers led to days of fires, looting and spasmodic violence.
In 1994 – the same year two Menendez juries, one for each young man, jammed between manslaughter and murder convictions – Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman were beaten to death in Brentwood. After a volatile trial, Simpson’s ex-husband, OJ Simpson was acquitted of the murders in 1995.
The second Menendez trial, this time with one jury, also began in 1995. The same judge who previously authorized the defense to call 50 witnesses and present evidence of abuse, limited testimony that would have supported an “excuse for abuse” in the second trial. That sealed the fate of the brothers. They were convicted of first-degree murder in March 1996 and served 33 years in prison.
Story continues
Read more: From the archive: Claims of Hatred, Abuse Traded in Menendez Case
I would argue that this spasmodic era came to an end the following year, when a civil jury was held in Santa Monica found Simpson liable for the death of his ex-wife and her boyfriend.
I tell you, it was an emotional and exhausting time in this city. Nothing that any of us would want to relive.
But attitudes towards domestic violence and sexual abuse have changed. New evidence about the Menendez family has come to light and now, after resigning themselves to death in prison, the brothers are hoping the case will be reopened.
Petition filed in Los Angeles County Superior Court in May describes two new relevant pieces of evidence which confirms Lyle and Erik’s claims that their father was an abusive monster and their mother did nothing to stop him.
One is a letter from 13-year-old Erik to his cousin discussing his father’s abuse. “I never know when it’s going to happen and it’s driving me crazy,” Erik wrote to his cousin, Andy Cano. “Every night I stay up thinking he might come in.”
Read more: New evidence may support the Menendez brothers’ sexual abuse claims. But can it set them free?
The second is an allegation by Roy Rosselló, a former member of the Puerto Rican boy band Menudo, that Jose Menendez, CEO of RCA Records at the time, raped him when he was 13.
A judge has yet to rule on the brothers’ request, which calls for either an evidence hearing or for the convictions and sentences to be vacated.
(Rosselló has also alleged that Menudo’s founder Edgardo Díaz repeatedly raped him between 1983 and 1986, when he was a member of the group. The LAPD confirmed to my colleague Salvador Hernandez that Díaz is under investigation for an incident that Rosselló says took place at the Biltmore Hotel, where he says Díaz attacked him. Rosselló’s sordid story and Menudo’s connection to Jose Menendez is explored in a powerful new three-part docuseries “Menendez + Menudo: Betraying Boys” by veteran journalists Robert Rand, author of “The Menendez Murders,” and Nery Ynclan. )
Rand has been writing about the Menendez case since the day after the murders and has developed close ties with the brothers’ extended family, most of whom believe Lyle and Erik have served long enough. It was Rand who discovered the letter, written by Erik, that may play a role in reopening the case.
“If they had a fair trial, they would have been free long ago,” says Kitty Menendez’s older sister, Joan VanderMolen, 91, who lives in Ventura. In “Menendez + Menudo”, she and her daughter Diane discuss why Erik seemed to be robbed as a child when there were no lemons in the house. “It was to get the taste of cum out of his mouth,” says Joan in one of the docuseries’ more shocking moments.
“I loved my sister dearly,” VanderMolen told me last week, “and it’s hard to talk about her, but somehow she managed to get this man of hers to boss around and beat the kids.” She had to know.”
She regularly speaks to her nephews by phone at the Richard J. Donovan Correctional Facility near San Diego, where they were allowed to separate after 22 years. “They had a terrible childhood,” she says. “Money had nothing to do with it.”
Who wants to dive back into the slump of LA in the 1990s? Not me. But all these years later, with insights from the #MeToo movement too fresh to ignore and new evidence at hand, reopening the case against Erik and Lyle Menendez seems like the right thing to do.
This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.