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Well, the holidays have come and gone once again. But if you've forgotten to get that special someone in your life a gift. Well, Mint Mobile is extending their holiday offer of half off unlimited wireless. So here's the idea. You get it now, you call it an early present for next year. What do you have to lose? Give it a try@mintmobile.com Switch limited time, 50% off regular price for new customers. Upfront payment required $45 for three months, $90 for six month or $180 for 12 month plan taxes and fees. Extra speeds may slow after 50 gigabytes per month when network is busy see terms. Welcome to the 2020 True Crime Vault where heart stopping headlines come to life. What happened? Who is the person that super shot? My mom and my dad. Your mom and dad. Okay. Careful what you wish, Careful what you wish for. People assume that if you have money, you have no problems and you're certainly not going to do anything like kill your parents. Now suddenly enter TikTok. Amazing. The Menendez story going viral in 2021. I don't believe they go also on trial. They don't deserve to live the rest of their life in prison. I think they're seen as the victims of a less enlightene. I would say people of my generation predominantly do believe that it was an act of self defense, just totally. Who could imagine 30 years after a double murder that Gen Z on Tik Tok would take on the Menendez case? Careful what you wish, boy. Okay. TikTok has been this hub for Gen Z in so many ways and now we're seeing them kind of turn their eye towards the criminal justice system. Calling all true crime fans, it's not supposed to happen. In Beverly Hills, a movie executive and his wife were brutally slain in their million dollar mansion. As I went into the room, I just started firing. What was in front of you? My parents. Millions of young people are looking back online and they're re examining old news stories from the 90s and 2000s particularly and looking at them with a fresh set of eyes. The Menendez brothers story was one of the most sensational murder trials of the 1990s. You saw a spoiled rich kid spinning out of control. So when the videos first started coming out, the content being created around the Menendez brothers was about how hot they were. The first videos that my son showed me on TikTok were a lot of young women who were lip syncing to the Britney Spears song Mama, I'm in love with a criminal. Mama, I'm in love With a criminal, people are like, oh, who is this, like, hot guy on the court stand? You know? And then I think people started doing the research into the Menendez case and being like, oh, this is, like, sick and twisted. Like, this is so wrong. It's a lot of kids going back, watching Court tv, seeing how everything was portrayed, but looking at it with a fresh set of eyes and a different set of values. This new movement probably started approximately when Court TV published the original courtroom footage. For the first time, people could be a Menendez juror themselves. Like, people in my generation wanted to defend the brothers and be like, these kids went through some horrible things and it wasn't right what happened to them. They said they did it because they'd been sexually abused. The question in the trial, if you believe that they were sexually abused, does that lessen their responsibility for murder? I think there is such an emotional response because this case involves sexual abuse of children. Emotion was just so real to me. Raw, authentic. I believed it. I don't believe that someone could fake that kind of emotion. These kids have a lot of power to shape the cultural narrative. You know, things start trending, and before you know it, you have millions of people that aren't even on TikTok paying attention to this case again. My name is Lyle Menendez. I've been incarcerated 31 years. I am the kid that did kill his parents. And no river of tears has changed that, and no amount of regret has changed it. You are often defined by a few moments of July, but that's not who you are in your life. Your life is your totality of it. I think I will end up dying still being in the nightmare of this horrifying event or trying to stay. Bring down the Berlin wal. Lyle and Eric Menendez seemed to have it all. They lived in this fairy tale world of wealth and country clubs. They were top flight tennis players, one of them at Princeton, the other one heading to ucla. They were rich. The father was a powerful Hollywood executive. They had achieved the American dream. They were living in the mansion in Beverly Hills. They were living behind the gate. So on the outside, to most people, this was the perfect all American family. People assume that if you have money, you have no problems. And you're certainly not going to do anything like kill your parents, because you got it made. And it turns out that rich people have dysfunctional families just as much as poor people. One kid killing the parents is a bad seed. Two kids killing the parents is a bad family. Jose Menendez was an immigrant. He wanted to make good and he was very driven to become the American success story. He immigrated from Cuba at about the age of 16. He was lonely boy, and mother adored him and emphasized his machismo and his male image. So much so that he became a little bit of a bully in Cuba, and he became a little bit of a monster to the parents. It was hard to control him. Here is a Cuban immigrant coming to this country as a teenager with very little driving, driving, driving through industry after industry, rental cars, music industry, Hollywood production, one after another with this ferocious drive and talent. Jose and Kitty Menendez met when they were both students at Southern Illinois University. Kitty, who was my sister, my younger sister, she was stunningly beautiful, and I mean beautiful on the outside and even more so on the inside. Jose saw in her what everybody else saw in her, and she saw this handsome Cuban. They got nerd when they were both in college, and then after graduation, they moved to New York. The sniper's bullet cut down Dr. King. The most significant change in the marriage of Jose and Kitty Menendez took place when their sons, Eric and Lyle, were born. Katie Menendez had dreams of becoming an actress. And after her sons were born, Jose basically told her, you can't work. You need to take care of our sons. The boys were extremely spoiled. I would tell Katie, I said, you know, there's got to be some discipline in their life somewhat, and I think it would be smart for you to rein them in a little bit and hold them accountable for some of the things that they do. And, of course, you would come right back and that, Brian, don't tell me how to raise my boys. She wanted Lyle and Eric to be as competitive as she was and as her husband was. When I think of Jose Menendez and his sons, the word that pops into my head is ownership. These were his prized thoroughbreds, his sons. They were going to reflect his own glory. And if they didn't, God help them. The world that the Menendez brothers grew up in was very affluent, and it started in Princeton, New Jersey. Jose had success on both coasts. First, the leafy precincts of Princeton, New Jersey, on the east coast, and then all the way in California in Beverly Hills, one of the legendary, luxurious places of the world. In Princeton, we saw them as rich kids. They were like a step above everybody else. Princeton was about old money, and you didn't show off, but they were different. As Jose changed jobs and became involved in different companies, this beautiful home in the center of Princeton came on the market, and they just both fell in love with it, and they wound up Buying it. And so this is beautiful, stately up there with a beautiful sort of a reservoir or detention pond behind the home, which again is also beautiful. And she was so proud of it. Jose and Kitty Menendez were very concerned about the facade of their family. They wanted the public image to be perfect. And one of the ways they did that was they did their son's homework. So the homework was always perfect. And then they would take tests in school and they would fail the test. Another way was to tell their sons who they could date, who they could be friends with. Lyle and Eric were very influenced by what their father thought and they wanted at all times to please dad. The affluence was all around them, but they were expected to work for it. And the work was to become tennis stars. They were going to be at the country club, owning a scene there. They were going to have beautiful girls on their arms and go to Ivy League top notch colleges. He gave them everything in Princeton. Limousine rights to New York, limo rights to school, because in that extent he was showing off through the kids. Lyle Menendez was going to be the better improved version of Jose. For Jose Menendez, having a go to an Ivy League school like Princeton was the end of the American dream. But Lyle Menendez had mediocre grades, was not a great student. He really wasn't Princeton material. He was a very strong tennis player. And so through a combination of his tennis abilities and also Jose Menendez made a $50,000 donation to Princeton. He was able to actually get his son into the sky school. But Lyle was flunking out of Princeton, not only academically, but socially. He was doing things he wasn't supposed to do. He was accused at one point of plagiarizing a paper and he was suspended for that. Jose Menendez rushed in to meet with the dean and to try to save his son, to try to stop the suspension. But his pleas didn't work. Joe was never satisfied. Lyle and Eric, I think, had a strong fear of dad. It was so obvious, but it was not spoken. Jose was such a dominant force in that family that the brothers looked at him. It was like he was the son and blotted everything else out. The impression I got about Jose Menendez's character was that he could be charming when he chose to, but that his basic nature was very abusive and that he was abusive to his sons especially, and to his wife. Describe your relationship with your father. Brutal, Painful, torturous. And yet I admired him because he was so strong and he was, he was everything that success was. That I was taught that success was and I thought that he was the most powerful and brilliant person I had ever met. To me, the Menendez brothers became homicidal monsters that were shaped by Jose Menendez. This episode is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. You ever find yourself playing the budgeting game? Well, with the name your price tool from Progressive you can find options that fit your budget and potentially lower your bills. Try it@progressive.com, progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates. Price and coverage match limited by state law. Not available in all states. This show is supported by Chime. Chime is changing the way you bank. Chime believes that your money is yours, which means you shouldn't have to pay fees to use it. So they offer smart fee free banking for everyday people. Their smart features include tools like MyPay, which gives you access to up to $500 of your paycheck anytime and and get you paid up to two days early with direct deposit. There are never any overdraft fees or minimum balance fees. It's stress free and fee free with overdraft protection you can count on. Plus with chimecard you can build credit history with your own money and get rewarded for everyday spending. No annual fees, no interest, no strings attached. Chime's not just smarter banking. It's the most rewarding way to bank. Join the millions who are already banking fee free today. It just takes a few minutes to sign up. Head to Chime.com 20 spelled out T W E N T Y. That's Chime dot. Chime is a financial technology company, not a bank. Banking services A secured Chime Visa credit card and MyPay line of credit provided by the Bancor Bank NA or Stride Bank NA. MyPay eligibility requirements apply and credit limit ranges $20 to $500. Optional services and products may have fees or charges. See chime.com feesinfo advertised annual percentage yield with Chime+status only. Otherwise 1.00% APY applies. No min balance required. Chime card on time Payment history may have a positive impact on your credit score. Results may vary. See chime.com for details and applicable terms. Hi fellow Americans, I've spoken to you from this historic office on many occasions and about many things. For 20 years, the Menendez family had been living in Princeton, New Jersey. And then Jose became an executive with Coal Pictures and Live Entertainment and the family moved to California in 1987. Initially, the Menendez family lived in the Los Angeles suburb of Calabasas and they were really, really proud to have this house that they had found there, and they were remodeling it. It was tennis courts and everything else available there. And this is just the most beautiful setting. I think the cheapest property in here is probably 2 million, and it goes all the way up to 20, 22 million. Frankie Avalon raised his six children here. Robert Blake lived here. Bruce Jenner, when he was Bruce Jenner, had a house here. Very spoiled. A lot of the kids. A lot of kids got involved with drugs. This is Mulholland highway just starting into Calabasas. 25 years ago, this was all open land. Eric and I used to come up here all the time. This is about eight to nine minutes from our high school. And we used to do some writing up here and look out over the valley. Eric and I, we just hit it off from the beginning. We both, we're chess players, we're both thinkers. We're both kind of outside the box in school. And we're in our rebellious phase and independent phase of 16, 17 years old. And we just had something that clicked. He was a little bit different. He was pretty ostentatious and he was flamboyant, but well liked. He would do things like walk into a store, and if somebody wouldn't immediately help him, he would jump up on a table and start throwing shoes and say, I'm here to buy something. He made himself known, and he was a presence, and he wanted what he wanted and found a way to get it. Eric and Lyle Menendez kept screwing up. They were hanging out with a group of friends that began doing what was called hot prowls, in which they would sneak into a house when nobody was there and think about committing burglary. But it was just a group of suburban kids that were, you know, dreaming about the fantasy of committing a crime. At one point, Lyle Menendez actually committed a burglary with several of his friends. Lyle had taken some things from a girlfriend's house and showed his little brother that he had done this crime. And his little brother said, well, I can do the same thing. And Eric went in and stole something, but. But then wanted to put it back before anybody knew. He just wanted to show his older brother that it could be done. The initial victims were the parents of some of their friends. And in the first burglary, over $100,000 of items were taken out of the house, including cash and jewelry taken from a safe. Now, it was my understanding that their burglaries consisted of backing up a moving van to a house that was empty and cleaning out the house, which is different from breaking into a house and stuff, stealing the family's silver. What's that about? I think they were practicing to be criminals. I think they thought being criminals would be a fun way to earn a living. They just got bored with life and they wanted excitement, they wanted challenges. And robbing houses was a challenge, something they tried to get away with. And they didn't think they'd be caught. They wind up getting arrested in. Jose, in his inimitable way, decided that he was going to quickly put it to rest. He didn't want it in the newspapers. And he went out and he visited every one of the homes that had been robbed. And he asked them what the value was of anything that was missing. And they gave him a number, a price of what they felt that it was worth. He apologized and his son apologized, and he wrote him a check right on the spot. Joe. When he found out that the children had been arrested, the main message was, how stupid of you to get caught. You're like sheep that follow. You're not leaders. And he was ashamed by them getting caught because I think Jose thought that life was about winning, and probably it was not as important how you got there. I think the parents lost control of them in part because they were in a culture where money can buy you anything, not just the BMW or the designer jeans. It can buy you a free pass out of trouble. When poor kids do a burglary, like they go to their neighbor's house and take the big screen tv, they go to juvenile court or they go on probation or something like that, when rich kids do it, they go to the psychiatrist. So I'm fairly certain that that was part of their court ordered treatment for their burglary problem. All I know is that they both got probation. They gave the stuff back, and I think it was shortly thereafter they moved down to Beverly Hills and left the Calabasas area. And Jose kind of said, let's distance ourselves from the Calabasas crowd. There are people, a great number of people, who think that you two are spoiled brats. What do you say to them? I don't know that there's anything I can say to them because I. I came from a family of wealth. It doesn't make me spoiled. I'm just a normal kid. Oh, Eric, you're a normal kid who killed your parents. Yeah, I know. And you still say you're a normal kid. Well, I didn't have normal experiences, but I am. I did that. And there's not a day that goes by that I don't think about what happened and wish that I could take that moment back. Is it hard for you, Lyle? It is difficult to be a whole 28 years defined by a day. Lyle Menendez was the alpha male of these two brothers. He was the one with the charisma, with a kind of sinister intelligence. High functioning, but cunning. And more than anything, he had a willpower like his father, who mastered Hollywood by being ruthless and cunning and capable of destroying adversaries in business. I think the Menendez brothers were close because they were fighting the common enemy, which was their father. He believed that life is like war and that anything you do to achieve your end is fine, including, it turns out, killing your parents. By early 1989, the Menendez family was living in a mansion in Beverly Hills. The Beverly Hills house on North Elm was amazing. When we saw it for the first time, we said, kitty, the house is so marvelous. Everything just shines of money. I think we're pretty normal here. Not much different than anywhere else. A lot of the kids, 16, you get that convertible, BMW. Some had multiple cars. Mercedes, a Porsche and a Lamborghini. Maybe kids have a little more privileges, but I don't really think it's different from anywhere else. Some you could see that their value system was upside down. Jose and Kitty both were really having second thoughts about having been so generous. She was very concerned about the irresponsibility of Lyle. He just felt that he could do anything and it didn't make any difference whether it was ethical or not. At a certain point, Eric and Lyle Menendez became a disappointment to their parents. Jose Menendez didn't approve of the women that Lyle was dating. Lyle was very fascinating young man to women. So Lyle had women all the time. And they were purported to be Victoria's Secret models. Lyle is now in his 20s. He didn't stay in college. And my sister Kitty began to recognize that they had essentially raised a playboy. And they took his credit cards away to try to educate him. He was really upset. And what he started to do was steal their credit cards and go out and buy what he wanted to buy anyway. Eric was a disappointment in other ways, in whatever Joe thought would be the right way for a young man to behave. I met Eric Menendez when I was doing a photo shoot in Beverly Hills. He was natural in front of the camera. He was very comfortable. I don't think Eric had really the physical attributes to be a working model, but he was photogenic. I think Eric was struggling to find his way and I don't know the insides of what went on in their house because he didn't talk about it. I don't know if it was awful. I don't know the truth about that. But that last photo shoot, something was a little bit different. And he was quieter and he was a little bit more withdrawn, a little bit more humble. But when I look at the pictures and when I think of, I can see that there was a difference. Those pictures to me looked very lonely and haunting. And I'm not so sure that I was looking into his soul. But in retrospect, there's something coming out of him that I didn't see on a regular basis. In the late 80s, early 90s. What people may have forgotten is that being gay was not that acceptable. It was just. I mean, gay marriage was decades off at that time. From what I knew of Jose Menendez, he would not have been the kind of father who would have embraced that. Did your father accuse you of being gay? Was it one of the things he used to say to tear you down? Yes. The prosecutor brought up the fact that you might have been a homosexual and that this might have caused some of the fury on your father's part. Yes, he did. I didn't hear about girlfriends. They were there. I guess what I just have to say to you is, are you gay? No, I'm not gay. Kitty was so upset the way things were happening and she was trying very, very hard to understand why they were doing what they were doing. She was also very worried about the state of her marriage because she discovered that Jose had been carrying on an eight year affair with a woman in New York. And that was extremely upsetting to her. She was very frustrated, she was disappointed. She was concerned that Jose was going to leave her. I don't think they trusted each other. They didn't particularly show affection. I don't think they ever touched each other. Jose Menendez, unknown to the mistress in New York, also had a woman that, that he was seen here in Los Angeles. She was explaining to me what the situation was and how it, how it hurt her. And the one thing she said to me, and I'll never forget it, she said, you know, the most difficult thing for me, Brian, is that I've lost my hero. Jose Menendez was carrying on affairs with a woman in New York, a woman in la, and he was also being supplied with prostitutes by a madam here in Los Angeles. It appeared to me that Kitty Menendez was the maid and the chauffeur and that the three men in her life were dominant. I think that her whole personality had Been erased by the family, and that she didn't have the ability or the wherewithal to stand up to her husband. I knew that Kitty didn't have a lot of friends and she did have a very private family life. But I know that she loved her sons and she loved Jose. This is a woman who was enduring the dissolution of her family. Her husband was cheating on her, her sons had turned into criminal louts, and she couldn't handle it. Tried to keep up a brave face with some people, popped pills when it got too much for her. At one point, she was rushed to a hospital after taking an overdose of Valium. People at the hospital felt that she had actually tried to commit suicide. She told Jose's sister she wished the brothers had never been born. Describe your relationship with your mother. My mother was a person in a lot of pain and she was alcoholic and she was suicidal. There was not a lot of communication, but she. I saw her as I heard and saw her get beaten by my dad. Your mother was battered. Battered physically, physically, certainly emotionally. And I would try to help her through it. We went through it together. I don't think she was depressed in Beverly Hills. What I did see is the situation that took place with Lyle. Lyle was stressing her a lot. And the thing with Calabasas just about broke her emotional back when she realized how far her son would go to basically have whatever he wanted. And so it was very, very painful to the two of them. But I think it was especially painful to Kitty. And then in the spring of 1989, Jose Menendez had several conversations with his brother in law, Carlos Barol, in which he. He told them he was disappointed in his sons and that he was thinking about taking them out of his will. So everybody was starting to have problems, and those problems were starting to spin the family out of control. We wrote a screenplay. We wrote several screenplays. We were ambitious young writers with a lot of ideas. And we said, well, let's write murder mysteries. Eric wrote a script about a boy that kills his parents to collect the insurance. And he brought that by for me to read and give him my opinion. A gloved hand is seen gripping the doorknob and turning it gently. Good evening, Mother. Good evening, Father. His voice is of attempted compassion, but the hatred overwhelms it. All light is extinguished and the camera slides down the stairs as screams are heard behind. We needed the characters to get money somehow and thought, well, here's an interesting way to do it. And it showed the Darwinistic tendencies of the child toward the parents. Remove them, and then I'm free and I can do what I want. But as time went by, Eric took that screenplay and reworded the first four or five pages to exactly what happened at the scene of the crime. And so people thought, well, maybe this is the precursor to what actually happened. He's already got the idea, and he's already beginning to execute in his mind the crime that he will eventually commit. Murdering his parents and for money, for the insurance money. It was powerful evidence that he'd been not just thinking about it, but playing with the idea, scoping it out, writing it down. I thought that it was probably pretty unreal, a bit of nonsense. I didn't contemplate that he was really planning to do such a thing. Not on any day did I think that if you looked at the Menendez brothers as teenagers, you saw spoiled rich kids spinning out of control. They were literally criminals. They were stealing, they were robbing. But the viciousness that Lyle and Eric Menendez eventually demonstrated, I think that has its seeds in their relationship with their father. Any way you cut it, Jose Menendez was the kind of person that people cowered from. Everybody described Jose Menendez as someone you should be afraid of. Someone who was always expecting perfection and never got it. When we went to their house, there was a ferret, always. And the ferret died one day. And Katie and Joe assumed that one of their dogs had killed it. And one of their dogs was a black, very aggressive dog. They had aggressive dogs. The children opened the refrigerator one day and found the dog's head inside. On the Tuesday before the murders, Lyle Menendez and his mother, Kitty, were having an argument. She got so upset that she began striking the older brother, and she even ripped off his toupee. And Eric was actually in the hallway, and he saw this happen. And he didn't even know that his brother was wearing a toupee, which his father had forced him to wear because he started having thinning hair. And the brothers had a very emotional conversation in which they agreed that there were so many secrets in the family. And at that point, Eric broke down and he started crying. And his brother said, what's wrong with. What are you crying about? And Eric said, dad. Dad has been doing things to me. When Lyle told me about the abuse, he was 8 years old at the time. One night I was in my room changing the sheets on my bed. And Lyle him in saying that he was afraid to sleep in his own bed because his father and him had been touching each other down there. And I went upstairs and Got Kitty by her demeanor. I could tell that she was not believing any of this. There was certainly no. No indication of any kind that there was ever any abuse. He had sexually molested me before I was a teenager, and it was a different. Much different experience than Eric's. Because you were little. Because I was little, I guess. But it was difficult to be close to my father and yet have so much conflict in the home. I mean, it just didn't happen. It just didn't happen. I think the motive was strictly money. My impression was that their father had cut them off. I think somewhere, starting with Lyle, there was a decision that this was just not going to be okay. It was not going to be okay to live in Beverly Hills and paupers or to have less than they had. They got cut off, and that wasn't cool. The source of the hatred wasn't that they wanted the money. Was the sexual abuse. The source of the homicide was that how dare he take away the money? In other words, the two theories of this case aren't necessarily contradictory. I was with Kitty in her Beverly Hills house, and she was using her computer. And I said, what are you doing with the computer? And she said, I'm changing my will. And as I looked down the aisle of the house, I said to Kitty, lyle's hearing you. He's going to know that you're changing your will right now. And she said, I don't care. She said, they know I'm not going to give them any money. No, no, no. That's not how that occurred. There was a confrontation. It's very difficult to understand the emotion and the fear and the conflict that is building over the years to something like this. It's difficult to just say, well, this is why this happened. There was going to be a violent confrontation at some point. And I thought in the end, I would probably be killed. When it first was revealed that I had told Lyle I was sexually molested by my father, my dad said to Lyle, you're going to tell everyone, and I'm not going to let that happen. And that's when we bought the guns. The week before they were murdered, I had lunch with Kitty. She had never been happier. She said that she was getting along with Jose. So she thought that everything was doing better at that time. There'd be good days, there'd be bad days. And Kitty had a sense of hope. I think, as would be natural, she didn't want this family to split apart and all the secrets of it perhaps, to spill out. She didn't want to Lose what she had. And I think you can hear in her the last strands of hope for this family. August 20, 1989, was an unusually warm, balmy evening in Beverly Hills. Most of the neighbors who lived near the Menendez Mansion at 722 N. Elm Dr. Had their windows open to let fresh air in. Beverly Hills is a quiet town. Even the business district kind of folds up at 7 o'. Clock. We average two murders a year and really don't know what you're in for when you get a murder call. What's the problem? What's the problem? Someone kill my parents. Pardon me? What? Who? Are they still there? Yes. The people. Oh, no. Were they shot? Yes. And they were shot? Yes. What happened? What happened? Who is the person that was shot? My mom and my dad. Your mom and dad? My mom and my dad. Okay, hold on a second. Okay, we're on our way over there with an ambulance. 12 shots in the middle of Beverly Hills on a Sunday night and no one calls. The police were waiting at the house. No one shows up. And I still can't believe it. I'm sitting on the stairs afterwards thinking the police are going to be there in seconds. They've got roving patrol and people. Many, many people did hear the shots. Many neighbors came in and said they heard all these shots, but nobody called because they just figured, this is Beverly Hills. This doesn't happen in Beverly Hills. So you called the police, but at that point you had already decided. We had decided not to. You weren't going to say anything? We had decided that our feeling was not. We'll just explain what happened and it'll be okay. We were very stunned and we felt that we would go to jail, obviously. And we. It was a selfish reason to just not want to have to go through that by this intersection. I could actually see the police tape in the police cars in front of Nenda's house. Hello? This is police department. Yeah. Okay. I want you to come outside, okay? Just come out the front door. You tell your brother everybody that's here, come outside. Okay? Okay. As we walked in the front door, the only thing I could really detect is the silence. It was just eerily quiet. It was so quiet Inside. From the foyer was a staircase, and then in the back of the foyer was this library family room, which is where the murder occurred. The television was on, so it was just a normal evening for them. Kitty was wearing white. She was covered in blood. Jose had a shotgun blast at the back of his head. Blood everywhere. There was brain matter on the ceiling. On the windows. It was really horrendous. When Jose and Kitty were found dead. The police didn't do what they normally do in a case like that. There are things that could have been done that night that would have proven that they were the killers. The murder weapons were in their cars. Nobody bothered to look. Both brothers had gunshot residue on their hands. At the time, we felt they were victims. And you're not going to press them because their parents just got blown away. A Beverly Hills criminal is going to be treated differently than a South Central Los Angeles criminal because the police understand that the Beverly Hills criminal is going to lawyer up. They're going to file complaints. Rich people view the police as being sort of lower than cleaning people. Okay. And so I think that influenced the way this case was prosecuted. The sons told police they left their parents at home to go to the movies. The pair said they came home from a movie and found their parents lying dead in pools of blood. We didn't have an alibi. All we did was say we were at the movies. But they never check you for gunpowder. He did phone the police that day. They didn't. I bet you they changed their policy. When I first heard Joe and Kitty had been murdered, I said with tears in my eyes, this is awful. Most awful thing I've ever heard. But what if it had been the kids? I don't know why I said that, but I must have had some basic instinct in the back of my head that told me that might be the case. I was in St. Louis in training for a new job, and I had my dog with me. I had my Dalmatian puppy, and I was watching the news. Jose was shot five times, Once to the head and four others to the body. And I just about squeezed the life out of my dog. I had nightmares. I had nightmares about it. I could see their house, and I could see them taking them out as I saw on tv, the bodies. It took me a while to figure it out. And what it was is that I remembered that I had the script about the boy that kills his parents to collect the insurance. And that was a very chilling realization to me. Tell me as clearly as you can why you murdered your parents. I wish. So afraid. I was running downstairs and I was crying, and my mother was on the couch and she had been drinking. And she said, what's wrong with you? And I said, nothing, Nothing. You wouldn't understand. And she said, oh, I understand. What, do you think I'm stupid? And she told me that she had known all my life what my father was doing. And Lyle said to my mother, are you gonna let this happen? And she said to him, you ruined this family. A few days before, I had said to myself, I'm never gonna let my father touch me again. And just before the shootings, my dad told me to get to my room. He was gonna come up and there was gonna be sex. And it was like an explosion in my mind. No, I'm just a normal kid. Oh, Eric, you're a normal kid who killed your parents. I wish everything would stop. The pair said they came home from a movie and found their parents lying dead in pools of blood. Just let me breathe. And what did you do after you reloaded? I ran around and shot my mom. For 12 years, Eric Menendez was sexually molested by his father. It became like a Rorschach test. You looked at Lyle Menendez, Eric Menendez. You either saw cynical, sinister, vicious killers or you saw victims. The sex abuse defense, the abuse rescues was new. But now, 30 years later and on social media like TikTok, Gen Z is weighing in. Millions of young people are looking back online and they're reexamining old news stories from the 90s and 2000s, particularly, and looking at them with a fresh set of eyes, people are like, oh, who is this, like, hot guy on the court stand? And then I think people started doing the research into the Menendez case. They don't deserve to live the rest of their life in prison. I think they've gone through enough and it's time that they come home. Careful what you wish for. This episode is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. You chose to hit play on this podcast today. Smart choice. Make another smart choice with Auto Quote Explorer to compare rates from multiple car insurance companies all at once. Try it@progressive.com Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates. Not available in all states or situations. Prices vary based on how you buy. This episode is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. You ever find yourself playing the budgeting game? Well, with the name your price tool from Progressive, you can find options that fit your budget and potentially lower your bills. Try it@progressive.com Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates. Price and coverage match limited by state law. Not available in all states. I was just living in the wake of what happened. Now you have secrets upon secrets. You're not living in the reality of what has occurred and why it occurred with anyone in your life. You're almost like emotionally you're a ghost. You're just living like a ghost among people that are alive. So you just. You're just adrift. Entertainment executive Jose Menendez and his wife were slain in the family room of their Beverly Hills mansion by killers using 12 gauge shotguns. They were murdered, killed gangland style in cold blood. Homicide detectives say it could have been a mob hit, contract killings. They tried to make it look like a mafia hit by the kneecapping. They told the police it was a mafia hit. The sun said they discovered the bodies when they arrived home several hours later. I've never seen anything like it. They weren't real wax. They look like wax. It was. It's something that I've never seen my dad help us, you know, I think. I think that possibly if LA and I would have been home, maybe my dad would be alive. The police felt it necessary to start investigating the organized crime aspect. And they soon realized that was a dead end. They knew that the brothers had done it, but knowing it and proving it are two different things. I remember it was the morning after the murder. I pulled up to the house and then all of a sudden my car door slammed open and Eric jumped in and scared the hell out of me. Frantically said to me that they needed my husband's legal help. I said, eric, what's going on here? He says, Mrs. Wright, my parents were murdered last night. And I said, what? He was not sad, not crying, no emotion whatsoever. Who would think of legal advice to the day of your parents murder unless you're guilty? I don't know how much they thought they were going to get, but I understand the estate was worth about $14 million at the time. In the days following the murders of Jose and Katie Menendez, Eric Menendez was a complete mess. He was emotionally distraught. And several days after the murders, Craig Signorelli claims that Eric Menendez confessed to him and told him that he was responsible for the deaths of his parents. It was a friend of mine that called me and said, dude, turn on the tv. How many shots do you think went on? About six in a row. My first instinct was to call Eric and get to Eric and find out what happened. We went back to the house and eventually sat down at a chessboard. And he looked up from the chessboard and as he had his fingers on the pieces, he said, do you want to know what happened? And I made a big mistake and said, yes. I can remember him telling me where the blood and skin landed and literally being in the room where it happened. It was a very intense, heavy moment. Realized that conversation was going to change my life and change his life and, you know, he had now burdened Me with something that I was stuck with earlier. Pretty heavy moral dilemma. So Craig didn't know how to take that. Whether he was saying it as a new plot for a new script or whether he did commit this murder. Five weeks after the murders, Eric and Lyle Menendez received an insurance policy payout of $400,000. And they went on a huge spending spree. I mean, if I killed my parents, I don't think I'd buy a Porsche that first week. One kid brought a Rolex watch, another a brand new Porsche. Another bought a restaurant in Princeton, New Jersey. I mean, the list goes on and on. They weren't shattered and traumatized by grief. They were having a grand old time spending the money of the dead man. You went off on a spending spree. I mean, I would think that you would be in such grief that you. You wouldn't be able to buy Rolexes and invest in businesses. Explain to me, Let me understand. You know, I'm the public. Lyle didn't buy anything without first approving it with my uncle or my aunt. You weren't just two greedy kids who wanted a lot of money, that's what you're saying. I didn't know what to do with the money. It got to a point where I have all this money and so much pain, I don't know what to do with it. Do you still think about the night of the murder? Every day. I had a dream once that was my mother having been shot, hugging me and me hugging her. And I woke up crying. And I woke up and I said, I'm back in the nightmare. I want to go back. I can never forgive myself. I just could not face God. I could not face God with what I had done. It's hard to live with that. And I thought of suicide. And for six months I was in agony. And I just wanted someone to talk to and I couldn't tell anyone. You went to your psychologist, Dr. Ozil, and told him that you had committed this crime. You were in torment and you told him. I felt that I was the worst person on earth. And I. It got to a point where I couldn't live with myself anymore. And I needed help. And so I went to him. And that is what the catalyst was for me getting arrested and Lyle. Eric had confessed the killings to Dr. Ozil. Dr. Ozil then went on to tape further conversations with Eric and Lyle and asked them details about the killings so he could get on tape their confessions. He told his lover, Judalon Smith, that if anything were to happen to him, if the tapes are in the lockbox. Go and get them and give them to police and they'll know what happened. She's the one that came to the police and said, I have information about this. Ozil, who, parenthetically, is the psychologist for Eric and Lyle Menendez. They didn't talk about shooting the father a whole lot. They did talk that they had to keep shooting the mother. Eric filled Dr. Oz many details about what had happened, including where they bought the shotguns. And ABC News has learned that two 12 gauge shotguns were purchased at this sporting goods store in San Diego on August 18, two days before the murders. And the following day is when we got warrants to recover these tapes and arrested Lyle. I couldn't believe it. The family was on the phone to each other. We were talking back and forth. How could this possibly be? The glow of innocence once surrounding the Menendez brothers is now shadowed by charges of murder. I thought the whole time it was done by the Mafia. I did not believe that it was the brothers. Prosecutors say greed drove the boys to shooting their parents to death last August. $14 million provides ample motive for some people to commit murder. To me, it was like a nightmare, like a movie, like it couldn't be reality. When somebody does something that horrible and you put it on television, there's a lynch mob mentality around somebody who commits a murder. We want justice. We want blood. Justice fast. The Menendez brothers tried was really the first big trial I covered, and it was a spectacle. It's like the crowds in the Roman Coliseum, you know, blood. They smell blood. When I first saw Eric Menendez walk into the courtroom, my blood went cold because I had never seen someone who had murdered his parents before. And it really was the Menendez case, and it was complex. And they said they did it because they'd been sexually abused. So the question, the question in the trial, if you believe that they were sexually abused, does that lessen their responsibility for murder? It will be your job to decide what kind of killing this is. That depends on what you come to believe was the reason for the actual. The only question in this case is why did these killings occur? I didn't buy it at the start at all. I thought it was a total artificial construct, a gambit by a desperate defense to do something to save these guys from the. From the death penalty. It will become apparent that this murder was unjustified and wholly premeditated, and that it was accomplished through a conspiracy into which Lyle Menendez entered with his brother. And that but for a few mistakes, they Made. This was almost the perfect murder. I knew that we could prove that the Menendez brothers killed their parents. But I also started thinking about, okay, let's say I'm a sleazy defense lawyer and I'm going to make up a defense. What defense would I make up? And I said, I think they're going to fabricate a sexual abuse defense, because I can't think of any other reason why we're going to trial. And guess what? They did. Eric Menendez was the abused son of wealthy parents. Leslie Abramson was one of the. One of the most unpleasant people I've ever had to cover. And yet I admired her because she was ferocious for her client, not her clients. It was Eric who was her client. He killed his parents because he could no longer endure their abuse and had to stop it. We never argued that child abuse is an excuse for murder. What we argued is child abuse creates a terrible fear. This is not a child abuse trial. This is a murder trial. Her reputation in the legal community was that she was a fighter who would go to the mat for her clients. But in the prosecutor's office, everyone told me, watch out for her. She will lie, cheat, and steal to win. The origin of this killing was a lifetime of abuse at the hands of those same parents. I think the strongest piece of evidence that we had, and certainly the most compelling for a prosecutor, were the crime scene photos and the way that they killed their parents. This is her before, and this is her after. And the problem for the defendants in this case is they can't explain adequately killing mom. They just can't do it. And I'd like you to look at those photographs and ask yourself, the prosecutors did a great job of portraying these two brothers who were clearly plotting a premeditated murder and taking apart their story piece by piece. I also noticed that there was a large portion of the back of his head was missing. Ejects the round of ammunition. Did you ask them why they killed their mother? They felt that they were putting the mother out of her misery. It ripped apart their stories and made them seem like petty liars covering up an appalling homicide. He came home and found two shots. You were crying, correct? Right. And at the same time, you were lying while you were crying, is that correct? Right. I think there was a near universal sense that this was going to be a sham defense and that it was going to be a joke. And then they got on the witness stands. What did you think was going to happen? I thought they were going ahead with their plan to kill Us. I was just sitting on the couch with my hands in my head saying, we're gonna die. We're gonna die. I can't believe this. Their story was that they were afraid of their parents. Afraid that their parents were. Were going to kill them. I mean, you're familiar with kids saying, oh, my father's gonna kill me. Oh, my parents are gonna kill me. Is that what you're talking about? No, no. Dad was gonna kill us. I could not conceive of these strapping young men being in such terror they had to kill their parents out of fear. So I didn't buy it. But they definitely needed that piece in order to get the self defense claim. We fired lots of, you know, many, many times. And there were just glass and you could hear things breaking and you could hear the ringing noises from the booms and there was the smoke from the guns. We learned that they went after Kitty in the most horrible way. That they reloaded and they came back to finish her off and that they still shot her. And I. And Joe was shot. So much so that he. I learned he was decapitated. Now, after you entered the den. I was just firing as I went into the room. I just started firing. In what direction? In front of me. What was in front of you? My parents. Eric testified she got up to run and there was blood on the bottom of her shoe inside the tread of her heads. And I think of. I think of her and I think of she got up and ran because her kids came in with shotguns and started shooting. I cannot imagine. I mean, I just can't imagine anything like that. It's just so horrific. Did you fire at the second figure? Did you fire at the first figure? Do you know if you fired a boat off to the side? I don't know. I don't know. I just walked into the room, I just started firing. And I don't know. I didn't think about these things. I didn't think, where was the. This, where was that? I just started firing. I remember my dad had coming forward in my direction. So he was standing on the. And I remember firing directly at him. I believe he fell back. Now what was it that happened after the shooting ended? I heard a noise from my mom. And what was your reaction to that noise? I just ran out of the room. And what did you do after you reloaded? I ran around and shot my mom. Where did you shoot her? The thrift store. And I shot her close. I thought that when Lyle described the killing of his mother that a normal jury would find it reprehensible and convict him. You know, we loved our mother. Oh, yeah, really? You loved your mother? You blew her up. The prosecution was completely focused on the idea that Eric and Lyle Menendez were greedy rich kids that had killed their parents because they were in a hurry to inherit their money. Why did you need to buy a Rolex watch four days after your parents were killed? I didn't need to. You wanted to. Well, what happened that day is that I was. My uncles had talked to my brother and I. And I think it was mainly my brother needed to get suits for the memorial service in LA that was coming up and also for the one that they were planning down in New Jersey. So you just thought a $9,000, 18 karat gold Rolex would go nicely with your funeral suit, is that right? And I thought that that was a very powerful part of the prosecution case. It persuaded me at the. I mean, I. I didn't think they were in fear for their lives. I didn't. I thought they were trying to get away with murder. Why they were murdering is what the question was. Mr. Menendez, you've heard the testimony of your brother that you and he killed your parents on August 20, 1989, did you not? Yes, we did. Trials are storytelling competitions. What do you believe was the originating cause of you and your brother ultimately winding up shooting your parents? So whoever tells the better story in a trial that's anchored in the facts as they come out, that's who's going to persuade the jury. Me telling. You telling what? Me telling Lyle that. You telling Lyle what? And to do that, you don't just say, this happened, this happened, this happened, this happened, this happened. You said, here's this person. This is what their experience was. This is what they did. And this is why. Your Honor, can I ask a leading question? If you don't ask my dad. Wait one second. No, no. He was in the process of answering, so there's no need to ask him. Can you answer the question? Yes. Okay. It was you telling Lyle what? My dad had been molesting me. Starting a business can seem like a daunting task unless you have a partner like Shopify. They have the tools you need to start and grow your business. From designing a website to marketing, to selling and beyond. Shopify can help with everything you need. There's a reason millions of companies like Mattel, Heinz and Allbirds continue to trust and use them. With Shopify on your side, turn your big business idea into sign up for your $1per month trial@shopify.com SpecialOffer this episode is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. You ever find yourself playing the budgeting game? Well, with the name your price tool from Progressive, you can find options that fit your budget and potentially lower your bills. Try it@progressive.com Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates. Price and coverage match limited by state law. Not available in all states. You could hear a pin drop in the courtroom. And that's when I thought, oh. Oh, darn, I'm in trouble. Television removes you from the intimacy of pain. To my dismay, the Menendez brothers trial became a gag on Saturday Night Live. Would you please state your names for the record? Lyle Menendez. Eric Menendez. It became a game show because it was on television. Can you tell the court who did murder your parents? Our other two brothers, Danny Menendez and Jose Menendez Jr. And they became cartoons in the public mind. Right? With sweaters and the tears and all that stuff. It was easy for people to dismiss what they were claiming as an act. The first thing they did is they always dressed in pastels, and they always wore the little crewneck Ralph Lauren sweaters and the little polo shirts underneath to make them look like little Easter egg candies. They were referred to all the time as the boys. Not the brothers, not the adults, because they were adults. The boys. The boys. The boys were the boys. The boys. The boys. The boys. And it got to the point where I was saying the boys because it's a shorthand for the dirtbags over there who killed her parents. For 12 years between the ages of 6 and 18, my client, Eric Menendez, was sexually molested by his father. The sex abuse defense, the abuse excuse, was new in the law, and so people were very, very skeptical of it. Sex abuse takes place in private. How can you prove it? Who witnesses it? The greatest omission that occurred for the Menendez brothers in terms of whether this happened or not was their failure to tell this to their own psychotherapist. When Eric Menendez was 10 years old, he told his cousin, Andy Cano, that he'd been sexually molested by his father. Well, he told me his father was massaging his. He used that word? Yes, he did. He wanted to know that this happened to every kid. I do remember very specifically was him asking me to make a promise to him never to reveal that to anybody. It's hard to explain that away. And then when their own testimony came in, it was very, very powerful. And between the ages of 6 and 8, did your father have sexual contact with you? Yes. And how did it Start. We would have these talks, and he would fondle me. And he would ask me to do the same with him. And I would touch him. We would undress. When Lyle appeared, it was a turning point because now you were hearing a whole different side of the story and details that no one had ever really heard before. We would be in the bathroom, and it would. He would put me on my knees, and he would guide me, all my movements, and I would. Have oral sex with him. The days that Lyle and Eric men ended up testified to their claims of sexual abuse are among the most unforgettable days I've ever had as a journalist. What else did he do to you? He used objects. What kind of objects? A toothbrush and. And some sort of shaving utensil brush. And did he try to anally penetrate you with something else? He did. And what was it? He braved me. There was a level of detail that people remember from real life that you almost wouldn't just kind of make up. Did you tell your brother? Did you do something to your brother? Yes. What did you do to your brother? I took him out to the woods whenever I felt. I don't know. I took him out sometimes. And I took a toothbrush also. And I played with Eric in the same way. And I'm sorry. And he says a. With such shame. But what is even more convincing, and I was sitting about 10ft from Eric is I saw this vein start popping out of his forehead as he hears his brother apologizing as their own secret, horrible sordidness comes out into public on television. Were you scared, Barry? Did you ask him not to? Yes. How did you ask him not to? I just told him. I don't. I don't. Know. I'm sorry. I just told him that I didn't want to do this and that it hurt me. And he said that he didn't mean to hurt me and he loved me. People in the audience were crying. Press members were crying, were dabbing at their eyes. They hear everything. They were crying. Frankly, I think their bad acting when they're trying to convince everybody that they were actually in fear for their lives when they killed their parents shows that they weren't pretending when they were casting themselves back to their experiences as little boys and being raped. Did you have some hope over that summer of 1989 for some improvement in your life? Yes. And what did you expect? I was gonna go to college. How significant a notion was this? It was the most important thing in my life. It was everything in my life. It Was all I thought about. Why was it all you thought about? Why was it all I thought about? Yeah. Because it would end the sex. And that's all I thought about. How did you feel at 18 about the fact that your father was having sex with you? I hated it. I hated it. I hated it. You slept in bed with your mom a lot, didn't you, even when you were little? Yes. And did you continue to sleep in her bed around this time when you were 11 and 12? Sometimes. And sometimes did you touch your mom? Yes. And where would you touch her? Um, everywhere. The idea that Eric and Lyle were abused by my sister Kitty is absolute insanity. I thought that was pretty gratuitous and just thrown in as an example of how awful the parents were. That Kitty deserved to die too, because she was complicit. Because the problem from their point of view was Jose was a jerk. But what do you do with the mother if he hadn't have killed his mom? I always think that he might have got away with that. Because your mother would have stood by you. She would have stuck up for you to save your life. Killing your parents is really a violation of the basic bedrock fact of social authority. Honor thy mother and father. I actually think that some of the revulsion against them was. It's an unnatural act. And it is an act that threatens the very fabric of society. The whole abuse excuse was a lie. I don't think children kill their parents willy nilly. I compare a closing argument in a high profile case to game seven in a World Series. There's an electricity that's literally floating in the air. It is unbelievably exciting. You heard about some of the things that he liked to do to his little boy. This is not a hard case at all. This is what happened. These two people were sitting there watching television and they got slaughtered by their sons. And one of them was to stick tacks like this in his thighs and in his butt. At the end of the day, this trial came down to, did you believe them? I remember thinking, he's either the best actor in the world, or this is a true story. These two terrorist parents built two bombs that blew up and killed them. It became like a Rorschach test. You looked at Lyle Menendez, Eric Menendez. You either saw cynical, sinister, vicious killers or you saw victims. I mean, this is a jury trial. It's only gonna take one juror to hang this up. Can we get all 12? The court declares a mistrial, and that completes this hearing. Jurors have told the Jury, they are unable to reach a verdict. Hopelessly deadlocked. The general public was screaming on talk radio. They said the brothers admitted they did it. What's wrong with those jurors? What's wrong with this judge? Why couldn't they get a conviction? We are going to be trying the case a second time. Round two, second time around. With this case, it was a different ballgame for a lot of reasons. Number one, the judge banned cameras in the courtroom. And the. The judge to some degree said, certain defense evidence I'm just not going to allow. So he reversed all his evidence rulings. And the jurors never heard anything about the family history. And several jurors that I interviewed after the second trial told me if they had heard that family history, they never would have voted for murder. There were a lot of people who donated their time and their expertise for free to the retrial on the Menendez case because people were so outraged at the jury hanging. At the end of the first trial, the Menendez family was broke. And in the second trial, both the brothers had their attorney's fees paid for by the people of the state of California. I knew they were going to get convicted the second time around because of the outrage around the first trial. I thought, look, good luck getting away with it now. Lyle and Eric Menendez have been found guilty of murdering their parents. It took a second trial for the two to be convicted of murder. In the first, the brothers barely reacted. Both slumped a little. Eric looked at a relative to say it would be okay and exchanged looks with his brother. We believe that most people in this county, perhaps even in this country, now believe that there was justice in this case. I thought that justice had been done in a legal sense, because I do think that they obviously they killed their parents and. And they failed to prove that they were in fear for their lives and therefore justified in doing so. But I thought that the fact they'd become laughing stocks around their claim of sexual abuse was an injustice, a moral injustice. What went through your minds when you heard that verdict? First degree murder? Guilty. That I was going to spend the rest of my life in prison without any possibility of ever getting released. Some people might say they should be punished as much as possible. What do you say to that? We will spend the rest of our life in prison. If we're not put in the same prison, there's a good probability I will never see him again. That I. Some things that you cannot take, and there's some things that you can door with everything taken away with the Last, you know, it's the last thing you can take. And that would be. That would be very, very difficult to live through. Eric and LYLE Menendez were 18 and 21 at the time that they killed their parents. At the height of the interest in the trial, both Eric and Lyle Menendez were receiving over a thousand letters a week from people from all over the world. And they develop close friendships with the two women that they married. Why on earth would you change your whole life for Eric Menendez? He's the most sensitive, kind. I mean, he's just. He's always there for me. He worries, you know, I never had that before. You realize, with all due respect that a lot of people think you're nuts. Oh, yes, I've heard it before, many times. If I just say to you, why, what do you say? My answer to that is, I fell in love with him unexpectedly. And it's quite a long journey that led me to there. Have you ever had sex with Eric? No. We can hug and kiss on the way out and hold hands during the visit. And the holding of the hands during the visit is everything. I can't offer her. Most of the things that another husband can in terms of being with her physically. What I can offer her is unconditional and complete devotion and love. She is everything to me. Lyle Menendez developed a friendship with a woman named Anna Erickson. I hope that we can get married someday soon. Even though it's a very limited relationship because of where we are, the exchange of love and sharing, it keeps you in touch with yourself and softer, you know, Otherwise you can become very hard and cold in here. Someday it might be possible for you to have children. Do you want to? I would very much like to have a family. I would feel concerned for the pressures that would be on children, having me as a father, Eric as a father, but an opportunity to give differently and give them love and just sort of, maybe it's a way of trying to correct some of the things that happened to us. I don't know. The marriage lasted about a year, and then Lyle Menendez married a second time to a woman who had been a pen pal. And they have a very, very close bond. One thing I've learned is that your physical comfort is much less important than your connection with the people around you and in your life that are important to you. I found I can have a healthy marriage that is complicated and built around conversation and finding creative ways to communicate and share without any of the props that are normally in marriage. Last October, my 14 year old son came to me one afternoon and said, dad, you have to come take a look at these videos. TikTok is full of Menendez brothers videos. Even after all these years, I still don't understand why a Lyle and an Eric could have done that. Something happened during the course of their childhood that turned them into murderers. You cannot escape those memories. Those ghosts, they never leave you. They always haunt you. You know, there's a part of me that says, you know, I need to get past my childhood, no matter how painful it is. It's just part of the fabric of who I am. I have thought since the trial that if the Menendez brothers were the Menendez sisters, they would be free today. We don't want to think, oh, boys get raped by their father. So that's why people are just so outraged because they were treated like this was impossible, like this was the narrative. Men cannot be raped, say, lasting equipment to actually be raped. That's why people are just angry. That is not okay. I think society has evolved a great deal in the past 27 years. People are aware that these things do happen within families. I would say people of my generation predominantly believe that it was an act of self defense and that these boys were horribly abused. I think they're seen as the victims of a less enlightened time. It's a moral crusade. It's an attempt to right a wrong. I don't believe they got a fair trial. This case is so deep and complex that they don't deserve to live the rest of their life in prison. You've seen social media campaigns to get certain people freed from jail that have been successful. I think they've gone through enough and it's time that they come home. They envision a future where their brothers are not in jail, and they do see that as within their capacity to somehow affect that. I think this is a positive trend in the sense that we should always be re examining our systems. But I also think it can be a little bit dangerous when you have somebody that is a convicted criminal that develops a fan base online. Sometimes that fan base can be blind to their crimes and the harms that they've caused. So I think that's where the danger comes in. This call and your telephone number will be monitored and recorded. Prison is not a relaxed environment. You feel that loss of freedom deeply. But I feel like there's a lot of purpose. There's still a lot of purpose in life, even in confinement, if you want it. I've pretty much just poured my energies into helping quality of life. Here helping people with their rehabilitation goals. Both Eric and Lyle Menendez have become contributing members of their prison community. I'm more of a fully formed adult now. It seems unimaginable because this seems so far removed from who I am and who I was. I don't know how some people survive it better than others. To a degree, I don't feel like I did. I mean, is there that much difference between a kid who goes through that, commit suicide or kills his parents and ends up doing life in prison? It's a failed, destructive ending at the start of the jazz pyramid. It could so easily not have happened. You've been listening to the 2020 True Crime Vault Friday nights at 9 on ABC. You can also find all new broadcast episodes of 2020. Thanks for listening. This episode is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Fiscally responsible financial geniuses. Monetary magicians. These are things about drivers who switch their car insurance to Progressive and save hundreds. Visit progressive.com to see if you could save Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates. Potential savings will vary. Not available in all states or situations.