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Foreign hey everyone, it's Katie. If you're loving Crime House Daily, you need to check out Crimes of, the newest show from Crime House. Crimes of is a weekly series that explores a new theme each season from Crimes of the paranormal, unsolved murders, mysterious disappearances, and more. Their first season is Crimes of Infamy, the true stories behind Hollywood's most iconic horror villains. Crimes of is a Crime House original powered by Pave Studios. Listen wherever you get your podcasts or find them on YouTube at Crime House Studios. New episodes out every Tuesday. This is Crime House. The Menendez brothers are running out of options for getting released from prison anytime soon. The brothers were originally sentenced to life without parole for murdering their parents 36 years ago. @ the time, they said it was self defense after years of sexual abuse from their father. Now another avenue they're pursuing is clemency, which Governor Gavin Newsom has the power to grant at any time while he's still governor. They seem to have it all, the looks, the money, the cars and the lavish lifestyle. But one bloody night uncovered the real truth behind the notorious Menendez brothers. Hi, I'm Katie Ring, a true crime analyst, self defense instructor and fierce advocate for victims. And this is Crime House Daily, your essential true crime companion. Every weekday morning and night here at Crime House Daily, we will be taking an investigative approach to true crime. We will be staying on the cases and trials making headlines now where justice is still in motion, arrests are still being made, and where new evidence is still coming to light. Every morning we will make sure you're up to speed on today's biggest crimes with our first watch episodes. And every night we go deeper with our night watch episodes. If you want to follow a case from the first 911 call to the final verdict, you're in the right place. Make sure to follow Crime House Daily wherever you get your podcasts. Leave A review hit five stars and for ad free listening, subscribe to Crime House plus on Apple Podcasts. For video content, head to our YouTube channel Rimehouse Daily. This episode discusses active criminal cases and breaking news. The information we share is based on what's publicly available at the time of recording and may change as new evidence comes to light. We aim to inform, not to decide guilt or innocence. So everyone mentioned is presumed innocent until proven guilty in a court of law. It's been more than three decades since since Lyle and Eric Menendez gunned down their parents in Beverly Hills. This case was once the ultimate 90s tabloid spectacle, but today it's back in the headlines. For a very different reason. Around this time last year, Netflix released a limited series called Monsters and it took the world by storm with its portrayal of the Menendez brothers. With their story writing another wave of popularity. The brothers were recently re sentenced and became eligible for parole. Now the question hanging over Los Angeles is whether these notorious killers might someday walk free. Tonight we will break it all down. From the crime itself to everything that has transpired since the case was thrust back into the spotlight last year.
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Learn more@WhatsApp.com Our story tonight was one of the most significant and widely publicized cases of the 90s. I'm talking about Lyle and Eric Menendez and the murder of their parents, Jose and Kitty. For years, this story seemed pretty straightforward. Driven by greed, the Menendez brothers gave killed their parents to gain access to the family fortune. But at trial, we heard a different story. The brothers claimed the murders were actually in self defense and that they were finally fighting back after years of horrifying emotional, physical and sexual abuse. And while there were multiple witnesses who supported these claims, the jury found Eric and Lyle guilty and they were sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. But their luck may be changing. Thanks to a recent update in court, their sentence has changed and they may be able to walk out of prison soon. But before we get into all of the updates, let's start back at the beginning with the two victims, Jose and Kitty Menendez. Jose was born in Cuba to a wealthy family. When his family fled to the US in 1960, the 16 year old's family had to leave everything behind. But Jose was determined to regain that comfortable lifestyle he had lost. He worked hard and got accepted into Southern Illinois University, where he met his future wife, Mary Louise Anderson, who went by Kitty. They got married in 1963 when Jose was 19 and Kitty was 22. From there, they moved to New York, where Jose got an accounting degree and began his climb up the corporate ladder. Eventually, he made his way into the entertainment industry and became a successful music executive. In the meantime, they also started a family. Kitty gave birth to two boys, Lyle, who was born in 1968, and Eric, who was born in 1970. Jose and Kitty had worked hard to give their sons an incredible life. But with all the wealth and privilege came a lot of expectations. Jose controlled every facet of his boys lives. Who they saw, what they ate and what they did with nearly every minute of their day. Each morning at breakfast, he quizzed the boys about current events and made them recite a saying. Part of it goes like today I will be the master of my emotions. If I feel depressed, I will sing. If I feel sad, I will laugh. If I feel ill, I will double my labor. If I feel poverty, I will think of wealth to come. And that wasn't the only message Jose Menendez brought drilled into his boys. There was also the family motto, Lie, cheat, steal, but win. And it became clear that Lyle and Eric really took that one to heart. Because in 1998, after the family moved to a wealthy suburb in LA called Calabasas for a job, Jose landed at a video distribution company. Lyle, who was 20 at the time, and Eric, who was 17, committed multiple burglaries in their neighborhood. Despite pulling some strings to keep the boys out of serious legal trouble, the Menendez family was no longer welcome in Calabasas. So they ended up moving to Beverly Hills. In the summer of 1989. Lyle and Eric's criminal activities continued when they used a stolen driver's license to to buy two 12 gauge shotguns. But it didn't stop there. On the night of August 20, 1989, the brothers entered the den of their family home while Jose and Kitty were watching a movie and shot their parents over a dozen times. The attack was brutal. The pellets hit Jose first, spraying across his arms. Then one of the brothers placed the barrel of his gun against the back of Jose's head and fired again, killing him instantly. Kitty woke up covered in her husband's blood and leaped off the couch trying to flee. But one brother shot her in the leg. Lying on the floor, Kitty tried to crawl away, but Lyle and Eric riddled her with the shotgun blast until their weapons were empty. Somehow, Kitty was still alive. So her sons ran back outside to get more more ammo from their car and then came back to finish the job. Despite the gruesome and shockingly cold blooded nature of these killings, no one in the Menendez neighborhood noticed anything. A neighbor would later describe hearing what he called popping sounds. But he didn't realize until later just how sinister they were to craft an alibi. Like Lyle and Eric went to go buy tickets at a showing of Batman. So it would seem like they were at the movies when their Parents were killed, but the tickets were timestamped so that one clearly wasn't going to work out. Instead, they head to the Taste of LA Festival in hopes that they would be recognized and seen. When Lyle and Eric returned home that night, their parents bodies still hadn't been discovered. So at 11:47pm they called 911 themselves. When police arrived, neighbors heard a horrible scream. And as they peeked out of their homes, they saw 18 year old Eric curled up and sobbing on the lawn. The brothers weren't originally treated as suspects. They told investigators they believed the killings were business related because Jose worked for a video distribution company that had ties to the Mafia. So it was a plausible theory. The cops investigated this angle, but before long, something else caught their attention. Eric and Lyle's spending habits. They split the $650,000 from Jose's life insurance policy. But that was just the tip of the iceberg. It's estimated Lyle and Eric received around $2 million each after loan repayments and taxes. And they used that money to go on an insane shopping spree. Just a few days after their parents were killed, Lyle and Eric spent $15,000 on new Rolex watches and money clips. They claimed to be too afraid of the Mafia to return to their mansion, so they moved into a luxury hotel in Bel Air. By October of 1989, less than six weeks after the murders, Lyle had run up $90,000 in charges on Jose's American Express card in hopes of becoming a savvy businessman. He also spent half a million dollars to buy a takeout restaurant near Princeton's campus in New Jersey, paying more than double what the business was worth. And even as the restaurant bled money, Lyle was making aggressive expansion plans. Meanwhile, Eric spent most of his half on tennis. He paid $60,000 for a professional coach and began traveling the world to compete in private tournaments. And of course, he'd always stay at the fanciest hotels. The brothers even sat courtside for a Knicks game at Madison Square Garden. And someone later noticed they ended up in the background of a basketball trading card. In just four months since their parents murders, Lyle and Eric Menendez had racked up more than a million dollars in spending and credit card charges. It was an eyebrow raising amount of money for two young men who were supposedly grieving. And it was enough to make the Beverly Hills police start to doubt the brothers mob hit story.
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Let's do this.
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Hey, you weren't listening to me.
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Meet the New Avengers. That's cool, man.
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Marvel Studios Thunderbolts the New Avengers. Rated PG 13. Now streaming on. You guessed it, Disney Plus.
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Okay, so the police are starting to doubt the brothers, but spending money isn't a crime. However, it wasn't long before the police's hunch was confirmed. Shortly after the murders, Eric allegedly confessed to his psychologist, Dr. Jerome Ozil. He reportedly explained how they'd been inspired by a movie called the Billionaire Boys Club, which was based on the real story of some Beverly Hills rich kids who committed two murders for for financial gain. Eric apparently described how they'd bought shotguns in San Diego using a friend's driver's license and how they'd thrown the murder weapons into a canyon after the crime. When Lyle returned to LA and learned that his brother had confessed to the therapist, he rushed to Dr. Ozil's office. He told Ozil that he'd kill him if he turned them in. Ironically, by threatening Dr. Ozil, Lyle had eliminated their legal right to doctor patient confidentiality. But instead of going to the police, Dr. Ozil continued to treat the Menendez brothers for the next few months. He later explained that he wanted to help them figure out what truly drove them to murder their parents. But Dr. Ozil knew he was risking his safety, so he came up with a plan in case things went wrong. He asked his business associate and mistress, a woman named Judalon Smith, to eavesdrop on his sessions. That way, if his life was in danger, she could call the police. And in early March of 1990, Judalon was listening in when she heard the Menendez brothers confess to the killing and threatened Dr. Ozil. She reported it to the police and they got a Warrant to search Dr. Ozil's office and confiscate tapes he'd recorded of his sessions with Lyle and Eric. Once the police heard the tapes, they had everything they needed to make an arrest. On March 8, 1990, 22 year old Lyle was heading out to lunch with his friends when police surrounded his jeep and took him into custody. Eric was competing in a tennis tournament in Israel, but agreed to surrender to authorities. Three days later, the police had their suspects in custody. Now they had to make their case at trial. A trial that 30 years later got another look. As the state of California built its case against the Menendez brothers, their argument rested on a simple motive. Greed. Meanwhile, Lyle and Eric's lawyers were going to argue that their clients had acted in self defense to put an end to the cycle of abuse that had ranged from psychological to sexual throughout their entire lives. When the trial began In July of 1993, 25 year old Lyle and 22 year old Eric claimed that Jose had abused and molested them from early childhood into adulthood. The boys later found out that their mother, Kitty knew about it the whole time and did nothing. They said that Jose had threatened to kill them if they spoke out about the abuse and that on the night of their murder, Jose had closed the door to the den, which he normally didn't do, Thinking he was planning to hurt them. They ran outside, quickly loaded their shotguns, and then ran inside and started to fire in a panic. The defense called multiple witnesses whose testimonies corroborated their stories of abuse. But the state argued that the abuse had never come up in sessions with Dr. Ozil. In the end, it was up to the jury to decide what to believe. But they couldn't come to an agreement and in January 1994, the case ended in a mistrial. Lyle and Eric's second trial began in 1995, and this time the prosecution had new evidence on its side. One of the major revelations was that Lyle had allegedly asked an ex girlfriend to commit perjury on his behalf and testify that his father had made unwanted advances towards her. The prosecution also brought in an expert witness who testified that Jose and Kitty weren't shot in a blind panic like the defense said, but in a cold and calculated ambush. All of this, combined with stigmas around male victims of sexual abuse, were enough to secure the verdict the state had been hoping for. On March 20, 1996, Eric and Lyle Menendez were convicted of first degree murder and sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. For a long time, that's where it looked like the story would end. Despite the brothers appeals, their attempts at getting their convictions overturned went nowhere. For the next three decades, the Menendez brothers remained in prison and. And it seemed like that's where they'd remain for the rest of their lives. But all of that changed in May of 2023 when a shocking revelation came to light and forced the authorities to look at this case in a whole new light. In May of 2023, Peacock released a documentary called Menendez in Boys Betrayed. It featured Ray Rosello, a former member of the boy band Menudo. He claimed that Jose Menendez raped him as a teenager, which gave a renewed credibility to Eric and Lyle's claims of sexual abuse. This allegation has not been proven in court, but it brought a ton of attention back on the Menendez brothers. They were back in the headlines. And just about a year ago, in September 2024, the conversation got even more intense when Netflix released the Lyle and Eric Menendez story. With all of this publicity going on, the Menendez brothers requested a hearing on their case. And in the fall of 2024, LA District Attorney George Gascon announced he was officially asking the court to re sentence them. This wasn't to say that he necessarily thought they were innocent, but Gascon believed that they had paid their debt to society and should be eligible for parole. Not only did he think that the brothers had been subjected to an ungodly amount of pressure and abuse at home, but that they'd also been model prisoners during their incarceration, taking college courses and helping other inmates. They'd even helped establish a hospice program for elderly prisoners. A re sentencing hearing was set for a couple months later on December 11, 2024. But before that could happen, there was a huge complication.
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Payment of $45 for three month plan $15 per month equivalent required. New customer offer first three months only, then full price plan options available, taxes and fees extra. See mintmobile.com On November 5, George Gascon lost his election in and was replaced by Nathan Hockman. Hockman said he needed more time to review everything and the proceedings were delayed to late January 2025. But then the tragic LA wildfires forced another delay, this time to March 2025. And after that there was another delay to April. But the hearing didn't actually happen until May. By then, Nathan Hockman had made a decision. He requested for the hearing to be canceled altogether. But the judge overseeing the case rejected that request twice. So on May 13, 2025, the Menendez brothers got another shot at freedom. During the day long hearing, Eric and Lyle once again relived that brief, brutal night in 1989. They describe the shock and betrayal their parents must have felt in their final moments, and they admitted wrongdoing and asked for forgiveness. The judge also heard from relatives, a few prisoners and even a former judge who supported Lyle and Eric's case. Their family also testified on their behalf. The district Attorney's office felt differently, though. Deputy DA Habib Balian didn't dispute that the brothers had done good work behind bars. But he stressed that the most important issue at the moment was whether or not the brothers were rehabilitated, and he argued they were far from it. Balian cited the barrage of excuses the brothers have used for the murders over the years, as well as the wealth of lies they used with police and in court to avoid going to prison in the first place. He said that Eric and Lyle Menendez may have grown up, but they still hadn't really taken responsibility for their actions when they were 18 and 21. In the end, it came down to the decision of Judge Michael Jessick, and he decided the brothers deserved a chance to prove themselves. When the hearing concluded, he, Eric and Lyle Menendez were re sentenced to 50 years to life, which meant that they were now eligible for parole. And just in August, they each had a parole hearing. They faced intense grilling about their crime, their childhood and their lives behind bars. Eric's hearing alone lasted 10 hours. In the end, both brothers were denied parole. In Eric's case, it was because of his association with a prison gang called the Two Fibers and an alleged tax scheme they'd pulled for Lyle. It was for his possession of an illicit cell phone. So they'll both remain in prison, at least for now. They'll be eligible for another parole hearing in 2028, but they can also request something called an administrative review in one year year. That means they could be back in front of a parole board in as little as 18 months. In the meantime, a bid for clemency or a potential pardon is winding its way through the California government. We'll keep you posted as developments come in. And as always, be sure to follow Crime House 247 for breaking news. What did you think of today's case? Drop your thoughts and theories in the comments. Follow us rimehouse24.7 on TikTok and Instagram and subscribe on YouTube CrimeHouseDaily for ad free listening, join Crime House plus on Apple Podcasts. You stay curious and I'll stay on the case. See you next time.