The Wild, True Story Behind ‘Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story’
On Friday, Monster—a collection from a super producer Ryan Murphy And Ian Brennan explores the psyches of society’s most pitiful characters—returns to Netflix for a second season. Last time, the show tackled Jeffrey Dahmer. This time, Murphy and Brennan are turning their lens on not one, but two “monsters” in Lyle And Erik Menendez, Two brothers were sentenced to life in prison without parole after being convicted of the murders of their parents, José and Mary Louise “Kitty” Menendez. The brothers maintained that their crimes were self-defense after enduring years of psychological, emotional and sexual abuse at the hands of their father.
Newcomer Nicholas Alexander Chavez And Cooper Koch plays Lyle and Erik respectively, while Oscar winner Javier Bardem and was nominated for an Oscar Chloe Sevigny play José and Kitty.
When trying to decide which track to follow Dahmer, Murphy and Brennan found inspiration in the most unlikely place: TikTok. “There are thousands and thousands and thousands of TikTok videos from young people, especially young women, talking about the Lyle and Erik Menendez case,” Murphy said during a Q&A following a recent screening of the series’ first episode in New York.
Brennan believes the renewed interest in the Menendez brothers may have something to do with how society’s attitudes have evolved since the ’90s. “We finally have a vernacular for thinking about and discussing sexual abuse and mental health that didn’t exist back then,” Brennan says. “I think that’s really exciting for a certain age group who look back at their parents’ generation and wonder, ‘What did you do? You didn’t know how to see the world.'”
On the surface, the Menendez family seemed like the embodiment of the American dream. After immigrating to the United States from Cuba at the tail end of the Cuban Revolution, José met and married Kitty while attending Southern Illinois University. Joseph “Lyle” Menendez was born in 1968, and Erik Galen Menendez was born in 1970. Thanks to José’s work in the home video industry, the family climbed the socioeconomic ladder, moving from suburban New Jersey to Beverly Hills when the boys were teenagers. But beneath their perfect exterior—Lyle was enrolled at Princeton, while Erik was a nationally ranked junior tennis player—a nightmare was brewing.
Erik and Lyle were 18 and 21 when they shot and killed their parents in the den of their Beverly Hills mansion on August 20, 1989. After they were arrested for the murders in March 1990, two conflicting stories emerged. The prosecution maintained that the children killed their parents to inherit their vast fortune—and cited evidence of their lavish spending after the murders, with Lyle buying a Rolex and a Porsche Carrera soon after. Meanwhile, Erik hired a full-time tennis coach and traveled to Israel to play tournaments. But their defense attorney, Leslie Abramson—played in the series by Ari Graynor—claiming that Erik and Lyle had been emotionally, psychologically, and sexually abused by José, a torment that was ignored by the alcoholic and drug-addicted Kitty. In their tearful testimony, Lyle and Erik claimed that their father had threatened to kill them if they revealed the abuse, which drove them to commit their heinous acts.
Lyle and Erik were initially tried at the same time by separate juries. Both ended in deadlock and were declared mistrials. They were then tried together, in a new trial presided over by Judge Stanley Weisberg, Who Limiting the inclusion of statements about sexual assaultIn 1996, Lyle and Erik were convicted of first-degree murder and conspiracy to commit murder. Both brothers are currently serving life sentences at the Richard J. Donovan Correctional Facility.
“I think sexual abuse, especially male sexual abuse, is not an issue that a lot of people in the media have talked about,” Murphy said. “I think this will open up a lot of discussion about it.”
When creating the controversial series, Murphy insists that staying true to the truth was paramount. “By the way, everything in here is true,” he says. “We spent many, many, many years researching this.” As is often the case with sensational stories, that includes some of the wildest and most unbelievable details found in the Netflix series.
Wing stop
The first episode of Monster: The Story of Lyle and Erik Menendezy plunges us directly into the belly of the beast, opening with the brothers in the back of a limousine on their way to the memorial service for their recently deceased parents. Erik struggles to keep his cool, while Lyle daydreams wildly about owning and operating a chain of buffalo wings. While this may sound absurd, the elder Menendez brother was actually quite passionate about chicken wings, even purchasing Chuck’s Spring Street Cafe, a spicy chicken wing restaurant in Princeton, New Jersey, after the murders, and renaming it Mr. Buffalo. His roommate at Princeton, Hayden Rogers, even worked for Mendedez as the restaurant’s finance director for a time.
“He called me and—I was in construction at the time—and he called me and asked if I wanted to manage a restaurant that he was looking to buy,” Rogers explained to Roll Call in 2012“I went there, talked about it, decided it was a good opportunity, so I went to work for him.” Rogers was with Lyle on the day he was arrested. “We actually went to California, him and I and another friend, if I remember correctly, to look for another location to potentially expand the restaurant somewhere near UCLA,” Rogers said. “It’s a pretty unusual situation to find yourself in, but we were with him on our way to lunch when he was arrested.”
Blame it on the rain
Wings is just the tip of the iceberg for Lyle. The series premiere portrays Lyle as his more outgoing, fierce older brother, played brilliantly by Chavez. No moment in the premiere captures Lyle’s flamboyance better than the eulogy he gives to his parents at their memorial service, which ends with the strangest pin drop: Milli Vanilli’s “Girl I’m Gona Miss You,” according to Emmy-winning reporter Robert Rand, who wrote the book The Menendez Murders: The Shocking Untold Story of the Menendez Family and the Murder That Shocked the Nation and co-executive producer of the Peacock documentary series Menendez + Menudo: The Betrayed Boy, This awkward moment actually happened in real life. “Milli Vanilli’s ‘Miss You’ was also played at the Directors Guild’s memorial service for Jose and Kitty, parents of the #MenendezBrothers, on August 25, 1989, 35 years ago this week,” Rand posted on X on August 20.
