This is how two sons murdered their parents on August 20, 1989 in Beverly Hills, California.
Brothers Lyle and Erik Menendez, ages 21 and 19, surprised their wealthy parents, José and Kitty Menendez, in the family home. José and Kitty were watching a James Bond movie in the living room.
The two young men were armed with shotguns. They shot both of their parents at point-blank range, reloading their weapons multiple times. They shot their mother ten times; their father: six times.
Then the cover-up began. The brothers had planned everything in advance. They told police that their parents had been killed by unknown assailants.
The authorities believed their story for a while. Initial doubts were raised when the brothers began spending large amounts of their murdered parents’ money: around $700,000 in a short period of time. They bought Rolex watches, gambled, and hired a personal trainer.
Their dead parents left deep pockets. José Menendez had been a successful businessman; José and Kitty’s estate was worth around $14 million (about $36 million in 2025).
When the brothers hired a computer expert to alter their father’s recently updated will, police concluded that something was definitely awry.
Under renewed questioning, Lyle and Erik changed their story. They now admitted to murdering their parents…but they said that they had had their reasons.
The brothers claimed that they were abused both physically and sexually by both parents. But Erik and Lyle were not children; they were full-grown men. They further claimed that at the ages of 19 and 21, they had no means of escape. They had no option but to brutally murder both parents with shotguns, and then pin the blame on fictional killers.
Prosecutors—and finally a jury—believed otherwise. Lyle and Erik Menendez, now in their fifties, have been in prison for three and a half decades. This past week, both men were denied parole.
And that’s a good thing—as good as anything connected with this case possibly can be.
I remember the Menendez murders for three reasons.
Firstly, the story lingered in the media forever. The United States was a relatively calm place in 1989. A sensational double murder in a wealthy enclave in Los Angeles practically guaranteed journalistic obsession.
And journalists were obsessed. On CNN and other media outlets, we got updates every day.
The second reason I remember this case so well was that the Menendez brothers were—and are—my contemporaries. I was born the same year as Lyle Menendez (1968). I am a mere two years older than his brother Erik (born in 1970).
I did not buy the Menendez brothers’ alibi then, and I do not buy it now.
I was 21 in 1989. I know what that world was like, from the perspective of a young adult. While there was no Internet in those days, it was not the Dark Ages. It was not even the 1950s. Young people had options. And young adults (which is what both Menendez brothers were) certainly had options.
If their lurid tales of physical and sexual abuse were true, they would have had multiple legal routes. They had access to large amounts of cash. And at their ages, their parents had no legal jurisdiction over them.
They could have simply left the family home. They could have then pursued a criminal and civil case against their parents.
The civil portion of such a case probably would have resulted in a fortune for both brothers, anyway. (Can you imagine how much such damages would have been worth?) But only if their tales of physical and sexual abuse were true. Therein lay the difficulty.
José and Kitty Menendez, of course, never got their day in court. They never got a chance to debunk the wild stories told about them.
This is not to assert that José and Kitty Menendez were perfect parents. Few parents are. José, a Cuban immigrant, was a driven, high achiever with exacting standards. The Menendez brothers’ farfetched claims of sexual abuse were never proven. But it is not difficult to believe that José pushed his sons hard—perhaps too hard, by our present standards. Plenty of people have coped with overbearing parents, though, without murdering them.
I believe the prosecution’s argument, that the Menendez brothers mostly murdered their parents for the fortune they stood to inherit.
***
Neither brother was exactly a model citizen, even before the killings. In 1988, Erik and Lyle engaged in a string of burglaries, netting $100,000 in cash and jewelry ($273K in today’s money).
Lyle was ejected from Princeton University for plagiarism, poor grades, and vandalism.
As a high school student, Erik cowrote a play about a young man from a wealthy family killing his parents for their fortune.
They no doubt feared disinheritance, and perhaps with good reason. There were obviously tensions in the Menendez household prior to the murders. But was this because of two tyrannical, sexually deviant parents, or two greedy, sociopathic sons?
What does the evidence tell us?
***
Which brings me to the third reason why this story has stuck in my mind for 36 years.
Until that point in my life, most of the common-folk evildoers in the news (i.e., people who weren’t heads of state, or leaders of terrorist organizations) were considerably older than me. Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy, Jim Jones—all of these killers were at least a generation beyond me.
Erik and Lyle Menendez showed me that members of my generation were also capable of great evil. This was a lesson that would be repeated by child-killer Susan Smith (born in 1971) in 1994, and Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh (born in 1968) in 1995.
***
I’m all for forgiveness. If Erik and Lyle Menendez had stopped at burglary and vandalism, I would say: time passes and people change.
But when two rich kids shoot their parents multiple times with shotguns in a premeditated double murder, you don’t let them off on the basis of some half-baked, unsubstantiated, and improbable story. Not even thirty-six years later. God may forgive the Menendez brothers for their crime, but society bears no such obligation.
-ET