Loading summary
Transcript30 lines
- [00:00]
A
Foreign you're listening to a Tenderfoot TV podcast. Hi True Crime listeners. Tenderfoot wants to hear from you. We just launched a survey and we want to know about your favorite shows, your merch requests, and what you'd like to listen to in 2026. Share your feedback and you might be one of the winners. To receive free merch and a hundred dollar Amazon gift card, head over to Tennerfoot TV Survey for more. Thanks again. Now here's the show. Hi friends. I am so excited to share this new episode of True Crime with you. If you want to listen ad free and get early access to all the episodes for this month's case, you can subscribe to Tenderfoot plus at tenderfootplus.com or on Apple Podcasts. It's also one of the best ways to support the show. Hi friends, before we get started today, I want to share a brief note. Today's interview was recorded before the killing of Renee Nicole Goode and before the violence and resistance that have unfolded in my hometown of Minneapolis since then. I wanted to name that up front because this moment is significant, it matters. And now today's conversation exists alongside something much closer to home for me. Honestly, it is really hard to explain what it feels like to live here right now. There's a lot of grief and fear, but also there's this like deep sense of care for one another. It is impossible for me to overstate the pride that I have in my community right now. But you know, I feel a lot of sadness for what's happening, for the loss that brought us to this moment. And so all those emotions are kind of sitting side by side for me right now as we release this episode. If you don't live here in Minnesota, I really encourage you to pay attention to what's happening here and not as some like, headline that you're reading, but really as something ongoing. A situation with real people and real stakes. I'm sharing updates and context as thoughtfully as I can on Instagram and you can follow along lisastanton if that's helpful. But really I wanted to take some time to point you towards an action step. This is something that you know already. We do this at the end of every True Crime episode because this community has always shown up in really meaningful ways. And so I wanted to ask you today to Please consider visiting standwithminnesota.com It's a centralized resource that explains what's happening here and it offers concrete ways to support people on the ground. There's everything from legal defense to community based aid. Even Just you taking the time to check it out, to learn a little bit, to share, that's significant. That means a lot. It matters. I've seen the true crime community show up before for people, for families, for causes that needed attention. And I'm hoping that today you'll be willing to do that again, this time for my hometown. With that said, I want to transition into today's episode. This conversation is about how we tell stories, how we sit with violence and harm without turning it into spectacle, and what it means when these stories aren't distant, when they live in real places with real consequences. Thank you for being here. Hi, friends. Before we get started today, I want to set the tone for today's conversation. True crime usually lives at a distance from us. You know, it's. It's on a screen. It's in our podcast feeds. It's in a story that we can just pause and walk away from. But one of the things that interests me is what happens when those stories are tied to real places, when you can literally go stand outside the same house on the same street where something terrible once happened. Today's bonus episode is a conversation with Adam Paul Levine, the founder of Graveline Tours in Los Angeles, which is a mobile company that takes people through the city's most infamous crime scenes. But what really drew me to Adam was how closely our questions overlap. Why are we drawn to these stories? What responsibility do we have to the people at the center of them? And how do we talk about violence and harm without turning real lives into spectacle? In this conversation, we talk about empathy, exploitation, media narratives, and the long shadow that cultural moments cast over cases, especially when it comes to cases like the Menendez brothers and how their story has been told and retold. And retold. Think you're going to like it? Let's get into it. Hi, Adam. I am so excited to have you on the show today and to just get to chat about your work and these cases.
- [05:26]
B
I'm honored to be here, Celicia, and I'm a huge fan of true crime.
- [05:30]
A
Well, great. Let's just kind of, like, hop right in. I want. I want the listeners to get to know a little bit more about you, about your business, Graveline Tours. And so I think we should just kind of start from the beginning. For people who have never heard of Graveline Tours, I'd love if you could kind of just describe what it is, how it began when you and I first connected. I know you mentioned this actually started as more of a hobby and a passion that you had and that you didn't really necessarily view yourself as like a true crime aficionado in the traditional sense. So just curious what you meant by that and how it led to the work you're doing now.
- [06:04]
B
Just to give you an idea of what Graveline is, if you think of your traditional sightseeing celebrity tour that rides around LA in an open top bus, we are like that, but with two major alterations. Instead of showing homes where the celebrities live, we show homes where the celebrities were murdered, committed suicide, had overdoses, or some sort of a scandal. And rather than employing buses or vans or generic sightseeing vehicles, we take our passengers around mourners, as I like to call them, in vintage funeral Cadillac limousines that were restored for the purpose of the tours. And Graveline actually is not an idea that I can take credit for, although I wish I could. It goes back many years to actually when I was a kid in the 90s, late 80s and the 90s, Los Angeles actually had a grave tours sightseeing company. And that was how I discovered it as a teenager. And they used to drive around town in funeral hearses. And the hearses were converted into benches. They had benches in the rear so that passengers could be transported rather than bodies. And they would do exactly what we're doing today. I think probably the only difference between us and them is technological, because whereas the old Graveline used to play sound clips and they would have these old binding of paper and plastic covers that were printouts of the crime scene photos, we play sound clips, but we let people scan QR codes with their phones. So when you go to a stop, it will correspond to a certain part of a gallery page and it will draw up A number of JPEGs and images of the people that the stop discusses that lived in that house and died. And with regards to the part of the question about me not being a typical true crime aficionado, I may have misphrased that because I think that largely there really is no typical true crime aficionado. But I think that when a lot of people meet me, they're surprised that I do Graveline because I don't necessarily look the part. But I have always had this part of me. Well, always since I was 14 years old. I was 14 years old. My mother took me on a trip to London just for vacation and. And I found a pamphlet for a tour for somebody called Jack the Ripper. And I didn't know what it was or who that was. And I made my mom come with me on a Jack the Ripper walking tour and I was gone from then. And I think that what I do have in common with other people that love true crime, at least a lot of the ones that come on graveline tours, is that we have unification that sometimes presents in the form of all of us have experienced some sort of a trauma in our lives and lived through it. Because I've done some thinking about what it is that brings people to the true crime interest. And I think that it is on a very deep level, this vicarious sense of we can experience the true crime without actually being hurt, without actually being vulnerable, and then we can be safe again. It's almost like going on a roller coaster. It's temporary and you know that you're going to be back okay, but you just love the thrill of it. And I think that when you've experienced a trauma either in your early life or in your childhood, and you've survived it, there is a sense of affirmation that one gets from reading about and thinking about and experiencing stories about true crime. And I know that when I was a teenager, I was kind of living a trauma. I had a pretty unhappy, not particularly specially, but just a pretty unhappy standard teenage and childhood years in la. And my happy place was in a Graveline Tours limo. And I think it was because that was where I could be sure that I wasn't the screwed up one. I could be sure that there were other people that were not just in my boat, but actually even more screwed up than I was because they just did these things that were unimaginable to me.
- [10:27]
A
That's interesting one. I guess to your point about Jack the Ripper, I did a Jack the Ripper tour when I was in London as well, and it was actually the first tour I had gone on. But that really got me interested in tours specifically as a way to learn history. And I think this intersection between history and true crime is really fascinating because I don't think that people think of them as being related. Oftentimes they think of them as these, like distinct categories. But you know, with work you're doing with touring, I mean, like, the purpose of touring so often is about learning history and what do we make of the things that happened in the past. And also to your point about the trauma that people experience and how that kind of draws them to true crime, that's something I'm interested in as well. I feel like there's so much time I've spent thinking about, like, why is it that we have this sort of cult fascination with true crime? These stories that are the worst things that happen to people in their lives. And there's something that can be, of course, very voyeuristic and exploitative about that, which is why I really wanted to create truer crime, was how can we talk about true crime stories in a way that tries to be sensitive to some of that. But I do think that there is an element of that, like this sort of predictable nature of these stories. And I think especially some of the ways that they're told where it's like, okay, you have a clear bad guy and you know, there's justice at the end. And that's so often not what happens in a true crime story. But I do think that there's something about that that draws people and maybe obviously, like women predominantly are very interested in true crime. And I've heard some links that people talk about with that, with the traumas that women experience and being able to hear these stories as a weird comfort mechanism. I mean, I've talked a lot to my audience about how I was drawn to the genre after my own experience of being a financial fraud victim. And I don't think that that's coincidental, Although I'm not exactly sure you know, what those connections are. So I think that's kind of an interesting point that you're making, especially because you're often like in space with other true crime consumers, listeners, people who want to go on your tour. So you're getting to be able to connect with them in an in person way. Vers on a podcast, we're connecting occasionally on social media and things like that, but you don't necessarily get to have those same conversations and connection points. But overall, you know, I think something that always really stuck with me about the work that you're doing and from our early conversations was just how our goals are aligned in terms of like what I'm hoping to do with true or crime, which is, you know, go behind the headlines, encourage people to learn about these cases in a deeper way, honor the stories and the real people behind them, the nuances that exist. So I'm just wanting to hear a little bit more about how do you bring that philosophy into your torture? Because, you know, I might have listeners too that are kind of like, well, you know, you're charging people to go on these tours and you're making money off of these really traumatic events that happen to real people. How do you kind of reconcile those things and, you know, how do you try to keep the victims at the forefront of the work you're doing?
- [13:15]
B
Well, that is really the million dollar question. And I don't know that I know the complete answer. I will tell you that I see it as two strands that unite. Because to be honest with you and your audience, when I started Graveline Tours, I was not thinking very much about empathy. I mean, I always wanted to do it in a non exploitative way, but it was not a priority when I was building the company. I would say, however, that I think understanding, as you say, the nuances, the complexity and the gray areas in not just true crime stories, but in every story in history in general, is so crucial to being able to learn from it. Because what we learn as we get older is that there's something called conventional wisdom. And the conventional wisdom is what our teachers tell us, our parents tell us, the press tell us, the newspapers tell us, the TV tells us, and it's 99.98% of the time not fully accurate. And I think that when you bring that to true crime, it does some sort of sleight of hand, because you then start to have something that almost seems taboo, which is you can start to empathize with killers, and you can also start to be critical of victims, and it's not always the case. But when you start to do that, I think, is when you really start to get to the meat of every story. Because nothing is going to undo a murder, right? Nothing is going to be able to get into a time machine and bring the victim back to life, least of all the way that they died. And so you will never, ever be able to justify or excuse that. But what you can do is that you can understand it as deeply as you can. And in a way, that is a job of any kind of a detective, an author, a tour guide, which is to try and disentangle everything so that we don't have the comic book story. We want to hear the details that bring the story to life. And I think the only way to bring the story to life is to show that there's good and bad and a million different shades of gray in every person. So I just think it's something that is really beautiful about humanity, which is that we are very complicated souls and people, and that to do honor to any crime story, you have got to get it all out there.
- [15:48]
A
Yeah. And actually, I'm glad that you brought up the Menendez tour that you do, because I want to talk a little bit about some of your tours and just some of the information that you teach your tour goers and just to kind of build on what we talked about in our episodes about the Menendez brothers. So like you mentioned, you have this west side glory route, which is a tour that explores the Menendez brothers case, but it also explores the O.J. simpson case. And so, you know, that connection isn't something we talk a lot about in the true crime episodes. So I'm curious for you, why. Why did you decide to put these together? Like, what is the connection that you see and what kind of makes them a part of that same historical conversation?
- [16:27]
B
What ended up happening with me was that I realized that there was this one sort of obscure connection that I had remembered. I remembered that there was a connection between O.J. and the Menendez brothers that had occurred because of the overlapping of the trial and the for obsessees like myself, I had read a few articles that talked about how it's funny because even though the Menendez brothers and O.J. were one trial of the century and then the next trial of the century, there was a lot of overlap in a. The relative impact that one trial had on the outcome of the other. But also a very little known fact was that they had personal overlap and that they were the Menendez brothers and the Simpson family were family friends. And so I thought maybe it's possible to build on that. And what happened was that the more that I looked into the connections, the more my socks kind of fell off, because what I thought that were crazy connections that I already knew just built on themselves kind of exponentially. And then I realized there is enough for a pretty crazy tour that shows the dual evolution of both of these crimes from different seeds. That on top of all of that, have one very common theme, which is that if you look at the character of Jose Menendez and O.J. simpson, you're looking at somebody with. With pretty much the same personality, not the same person, not the same background, not the same characteristics, but the same pathology ran strong in both of them and I would argue was the proximate source for the crimes. It really seemed like we were looking at two families that lived and existed in the same time in the same city, and from the same pathological dynamic in the patriarch.
- [18:51]
A
I want to talk about that a little bit more. Those two connections between those cases and the parallels there and how the trial specifically impacted one another. But I think we should kind of back up a little bit and talk more about the Menendez brothers, that case, and just kind of have you shed a little bit more light on some of the things that you find so interesting about the case that we don't talk about in the True Crime episode that you kind of told me about that I thought were really things that I would love for True or Crime listeners to know about. And we'll kind of work our way back to the O.J. connection. But when we were first talking about the Menendez brothers case, you mentioned that part of your early interest in that story was with how the media was distorting and sensationalizing the brothers accounts of sexual abuse, and in particular, how there was the speculation about the brothers sexuality that was made into this big public spectacle, which isn't something we touch on much at all in the True Crime episodes. For anyone who kind of doesn't remember that era of coverage and its impact on the trial, can you explain, like, how that happened and what that portrayal looked like?
- [19:54]
B
Yeah, of course. And I would just preface that by saying that one thing we discussed in the tour as pertaining to both of these and equally to this case, is that we have to keep in mind that the cultural and political background of the year that this happened, so 1989 onwards, was very different with regards to LGBTQ issues than it is today, primarily because of the AIDS scourge. And that for people that don't remember or didn't live through it, it's pretty hard to communicate what a specter that was in the background of everybody's everyday life. And at the time, at least for myself and I. I'm gay. I was closeted. I was very young. I was eight when the. The brothers killed their parents. But then the trials happened a little bit later. But to think about homosexuality necessarily meant thinking about hiv. It was just something that you just couldn't really disentangle. So whatever kind of a stigma or taboo there already was on being gay in society, then you have to couple that with this bizarre virus that is completely not understood by scientists and tends to largely affect primarily gay men, which was something that a lot of people drew the obvious conclusion from. That it was. Don't mean it's a true conclusion. I just want to clarify that. But the obvious conclusion that you can draw, which was that there was some sort of a meaning in the fact that gays got AIDS and straight men didn't. And so with regards to the Menendez case, it really was mostly focused on Eric, and there was speculation about his sexuality at the time, and I would say it came from a few different issues. There were also incentives for people to speculate about Eric's sexuality. Eric was more of the shy, confused, lost one. He was the younger brother, and he was In Lyle's shadow, Lyle appeared very confident and sure of himself. He wasn't, but he was cocky and he was arrogant, and he went to Princeton. We don't really discuss how he got in, but he went to this grade school, and he was always vetted by Jose and Kitty as being the brains and the future of the family. And Eric was in Lyle's shadow, and he was not sure of himself. He never had a girlfriend for the whole time that they were growing up in that household. And Kitty used to give Eric a very hard time about not having a girlfriend. Now, another thing to add to this complexity, as if we needed to, is that Jose was assaulting his own children who were boys. So it would be a whole other episode just against the psychosexual dynamics at play just within the household. And why we think that Kitty might want to deflect by calling one of her children gay. But I will just say that after the parents died and the boys went on their spending spree, one of the things that Eric did was he hired a photographer, and he just sort of innocently had some modeling photos of himself taken. And there's a lot of ways to read into that. My take is just that he's this sort of young, oppressed guy who never had a chance to know himself at all. And when you're that age, you are interested in sex, and he was just trying to explore his own sexuality a little bit. At the time, 1990 and 1989, it was very racy to have shirtless photos of yourself taken, which is what they were. But because the boys were so handsome, I think that it was often something that worked against them. And when these photos were discovered, the press had a field day saying they're homoerotic, a guy photographer took them. But just to be clear, in reality, there was no indication from those photos whatsoever that Eric was gay. But when you have a press that needs to talk about the same story in order to sell papers over and over and over and over again, well, let's just throw that in, because what better angle than Eric may be being gay? Also, when they were on trial, Pam Bozanich, who was one of the prosecutors, she was on the team for the prosecutors in the first, and I believe the second trial as well, decided that it would strengthen the case of the DA if they could make the potential argument for Eric being gay. And the reason for that would be that it might imply in the juror's mind that the sex between Jose and his sons, at least with Eric, was not entirely forced that on some level, it could be consensual. She. Remember, if you have heard that quote of her saying, men can't be raped because they don't have the tools. That was the same woman who was implying that Eric was gay in order to make gains on the case. So she did that. And her main source, at least according to her, which I'm not sure I would take at anything more than face value, is that she heard from a prison guard that there was something going on one day with Eric in the prison showers, which is the genesis of that scene in Monsters, the nudity scene, which Ryan Murphy completely took to, like, a whole new level. But. But Bozanich got enough that she needed in order to start leaking rumors to the press that hopefully would make their way to the jury that Eric was at least bisexual. And she did that because she knew that there was a chance that it would help them to convict the brothers.
- [26:12]
A
That's really interesting. And I think also it's kind of fascinating to think about the ways in which, you know, legal teams use other tools beyond just, like, what you would typically think of in order to sway public opinion and then potentially sway an outcome of a trial, like speaking to the press and putting out a particular narrative that you hope makes its way back to the jury. But, you know, this cultural fascination with the brother sexuality, specifically, you know, with Eric's sexuality, continues today. This isn't just something that was happening in the past in that previous context, which is why you mentioned the Ryan Murphy's monster series. I want to kind of dive a little bit more into that. You know, for anyone who's unfamiliar, it's. It's a show. It's on Netflix, and it's fictionalized, but it's inspired by the true events of the Menendez brothers case. Netflix put out two shows about the Menendez brothers around the same time. So you have this Ryan Murphy monster series, and then you had the documentary that was made with, you know, hours and hours of recordings with the brothers themselves. So, you know, for some people, they only saw one or the other, and they maybe are just seeing the Ryan Murphy monster series, and they think, okay, yes, it's actors, it's dramatized, but this is a telling of a true story and true events of what happened. And so, you know, when both of these shows came out in 2024, it really kind of ignited this public interest in the case again. And this was also especially true for this younger audience who was really interested in the case as well because of this resurgence that it had on YouTube and TikTok as they were kind of looking back through the trial footage and saying, like, something isn't quite right about the way that. That this was handled. And overall, you know, the monster series takes this very stylized, dramaticized approach. So. So I'm curious to hear from you what you feel like, like, what did you make of Ryan Murphy's portrayal in the series and like, kind of what were your big takeaways?
- [27:59]
B
Well, I think the first thing that has to be said is that Ryan Murphy has his pulse on exactly what people want to watch at this time. At any time that he presents a show. He's immensely talented and extremely successful as a result of that. I thought it was so entertaining. I loved all of the tongue in cheek knots, the 80s, the TCBY references, which was my favorite frozen yogurt, and the Milli Vanilli music that he played from the standpoint of history and this little thing called truth. I was very empathic with the brothers response to the series, which for those of you that don't know was the entire Menendez family was aghast. They called it a shock you drama, and they said it was completely inaccurate and that it should be disavowed. And then there was this famous spat where somebody asked Ryan Murphy if he wanted to apologize to the brothers and he said, no, they should be sending me flowers. My main bone to pick with monsters in terms of accuracy and lack of accuracy. And this is something I've noticed Ryan Murphy does as almost a shtick for every drama that is based on reality, is that he takes something that has a kernel of truth and then he plays it up to sensationalize it in order to make the show more entertaining. And it's really hard to fault him for that because that's his job. But I would just say that it's very important for people to differentiate between the character Eric Menendez and Eric Menendez and the character Lyle Menendez. And Lyle Menendez. I would actually say that with regards to Kitty and Jose and Dominic Dunne, Leslie Abramson, all of those characters, I think were very accurately portrayed. But the linchpin of the series, which was the brothers, they carried this show in a way that was superbly entertaining because Ryan Murphy juiced it up so much, and he juiced it up so much sexually. And it seemed to me that they had Lyle being the ringleader who was trying to egg Eric on and always aggressing him to be more of an offender and more angry and take criminal action. And Eric was more of the passive character. Who was manipulated by the other one. And there was, of course, an implied possible sexual relationship, which was probably crossing a line, because there is absolutely no evidence to imply that the brothers ever had consensual sexual relations together. There is the one anecdote that Lyle told on the stand of taking Eric out and basically acting out the abuse that Jose did on Lyle to Eric. But that's something completely different and should not at all be conflated with consensual sex in their teenage years. So my main issue was that Ryan Murphy homoeroticized the story a great deal and took too much artistic liberties in order to amp up the entertainment value. And look, as a gay guy who's obsessed with true crime, I loved it, but it was completely misinformation. And a side consequence of that is that he focused exclusively on the abuse that came from Jose on Eric and Lyle. But in reality, if we're to believe what the boy said on the stand, and I think there's no reason not to. Kitty was also a culprit of sexual abuse of both of the brothers.
- [31:51]
A
Yeah, I think that with the Ryan Murphy series, it's interesting because there's been backlash against some of his other series in the monster franchise. Right. Kind of similar dynamics at play, where you're sensationalizing elements, maybe sexualizing elements. And you've had a lot of victims, families come forward and say that they're really upset about it. And you kind of get this kind of recurrent response from Ryan Murphy that's like, this is show business. This is my job. And, you know, I think to your point about what he said to the Menendez brothers, it was basically, you know, you should be thanking me. I'm bringing attention to your case. And I think it's one of those things that's tricky because it's like, there was a lot of attention brought to the case. Who's to say how much attention the case would have gotten if they would have become eligible for parole if the show didn't exist? We don't know. But it just kind of, I think, highlights the. The need for a shift towards more ethics in the genre, because it's like, we, of course, should be telling these stories. We, of course, should be putting them in the cultural limelight, bringing up stories from the past, especially ones that still have real consequences today, like in the case of the Menendez brothers, where they're still in prison. But if we can do that in a way that is entertaining while also ethical and nuanced, then we can maybe try to Bridge that gap a bit. One of the things that you kind of were just touching on was this piece about how Kitty was also a perpetrator of abuse in terms of what the brothers claimed on the stand about her. Whereas a lot of focus often gets put on Jose. And I think when we think about the Menendez brothers story in general, we kind of know the broad strokes, right? There's these two brothers, this really wealthy family. We know that, like Jose was sexually abusing both sons. But one of the things that you have kind of highlighted in our conversations is Jose and Kitty's childhoods and this idea that for both of them, you know, abuse can be cyclical. Context, do you feel like, is really important that people understand about Jose and Kitty's early lives and how it may be impacted what happened later on?
- [33:48]
B
Well, as we do know, and as you just said, abuse rarely is something that is not carried on between generations. And in the case of the brothers, Kitty and Jose both came from toxic households in different ways. They were both both victims of abuse at the hands of their parents. Although Kitty's was primarily psychological and emotional, I think her father may have had some violent outbursts with her mother, but I believe that she was not hurt physically. And Jose was sexually abused by his mother, Maria, when he was a little boy. In Cuba, the dynamic that we see at play is pretty standard in the sense that in this day and age, you know, where we're all talking therapy speak, it's very easy to say, well, you know, if somebody doesn't go work through it, then they're going to pass it on and they're going to internalize it. But that was a different time, and it was even a different time in 1989, you didn't go around talking about your therapist. They wouldn't have told their friends that they see Dr. Ozil because their parents think that they should be in a therapist. But even more so, when Jose was growing up, up in pre revolutionary Cuba, he was in this family that was extremely high achieving. They were very well off and they were also very athletic. His mother was a swimmer, his father was a great tennis player. And they had the appearance that Jose lived in the prison of always needed to attain his entire life perfection. So. So when he was a little boy, 5, 6, 7 years old, and his father used to go away on work trips, his mother would invite him into her bed and she would fondle him. And that is according to the neighbors of the Menendez family in Cuba. Really, when Jose started to exhibit eerily, they used the Adjective monstrous behavior. And he just became this entitled, very macho boy who knew that he could get anything he wanted. I'm not exactly sure how we can predict the impact that abuse will have psychologically on a victim, because it is a little bit different for everybody. Sometimes people actually withdraw or sometimes people hide it, but for whatever reason, Jose became extra aggressive and extra machulish. And the opposite dynamic was at play with the story of Kitty. Because Kitty grew up in a family in the Midwest where her father was very domineering and oppressive. And as a result, she was very depressed for most of her youth. She actually didn't really come into any semblance of a self, despite winning beauty pageants, until she met Jose in college. They met in a philosophy class, and it was like, according to Kitty's roommates, she just came to life. They said she was bulldozed. She was so enthralled with this guy who wanted to be with her and to marry her. And of course, I'm digressing, but she was the perfect American trophy wife for Jose, who was trying so hard to fit in and find acceptance to have. But the other one thing that I will add, Celicia, that isn't interesting to me, result of their abuse, is that. And this is why it does make me believe the brothers when they were talking about Kitty's behavior, if you remember, or if. If your viewers that have listened to some of the testimony on the stand will recall when Lyle was detailing the abuse at the hands of Kitty, it occurred when Jose was away and she would invite the boys into her bed. So in a very creepy and almost psychic way, Kitty was reliving the abuse that Jose's mother carried out on him with her children.
- [38:07]
A
I think that the complexity of both of their past and maybe how they internalized or didn't internalize those experiences and just kind of move forward with that trauma adds a lot of the nuance because I think in this story, we often talk about the Menendez brothers as sort of the victims. And our current interest in the case where, you know, in reality, like, obviously it was the parents who were killed and it was the brothers who were the perpetrators. So I think two, your earlier point about, like, just building empathy for all the people involved and how something like this came to be, it allows us to understand how we can maybe not recreate these same dynamics in the future. And then one of the other things I thought was really interesting about Jose in particular was just his complicated relationship to his own Cuban identity. He really seems to distance himself from it and kind of like reshape the family. Even though this is where he grew up, this is, you know, where his family had once had wealth. So for people who aren't as familiar with that layer, can you kind of talk us through that?
- [39:08]
B
Yeah, sure. Jose had a very complicated relationship with his heritage. I'm not exactly sure where it stemmed from, but I do think that Jose in general was so appearance oriented and obsessed that he was looking to do whatever he thought would put him at the highest value in strangers eyes. But that stranger was sort of the ideal typical American middle class, predominantly white society at the time. And so Jose came here and he didn't speak much English and he was 14 years old. And he was sent here because Castro had just taken power from Bautista and actually all of his family wealth was seized. So they him impoverished. And that must have been very traumatic for him on a deep level at that age to go through, especially for someone who defines himself by external things like money and appearances and athletics. And I believe that part of Jose's ruthless ambition stemmed from this inferiority complex that he always harbored. And I don't know what caused it, but I would guess that it had something to do with the sexual abuse. I think possibly some of it was just nature that was brought out by the sexual abuse. Might not otherwise have been. But as Jose attained more and more success, he sort of became more and more unwilling to be associated with his Cuban background. We also know keep in mind that Jose had political aspirations and was planning on running for Senate, I think, in Florida, if he had lived so at the time. Once again, it was 40 years ago and we lived in a very different society. Of course it was multicultural, but the zeitgeist was, you know, you would turn on the TV and you would see all in the Family and you would see married with children 90210 and all of these shows about beautiful rich white people. And Jose was working with all of them. Them, just like O.J. simpson, he would have been the lone minority figure in the boardroom. And he was so determined to prove himself, and he would prove himself in so many other ways that I think that he decided that he should probably at least unconsciously ditch the Cuban thing. And this was exhibited primarily in the fact that when Lyle was born, Lyle is actually his middle name. His full name is Joseph Lyle, and Joseph is English for Jose. Why didn't Jose name him Jose Lyle? If you wanted to name him after himself, he probably did it because he was in a different country and he had different attainments. And he maybe wanted to be remembered as the father of Joseph rather than being Jose. And they also did talk about, before their deaths, Jose talked to the kids about potentially changing their last name. I'm not sure how serious he was, but that was an idea that they bounced around the family. And, you know, I would just say the other thing is that in a lot of South American or Central American culture, there seems to be a tension between the people that came from indigenous peoples and tribes that were already on the land and the settlers and then the mestizos who were mixed between the two. And I think that the fact that Jose and his family had such a prominent identity as big movers and shakers in Cuba may have been partly to the fact that they were racist against other Latinos within Cuba. And we know that Jose was definitely racist in America, but, you know, who knows? But I do think that Jose wanted to do everything possible to change his identity to pretty much completely white.
- [43:12]
A
Yeah. I think that the piece about the names is interesting, too, and just like the ways that you try to assimilate to the culture and society. And that's a. You know, you can see it in a. In a more, you know, a light of, like, you know, this is just somebody trying to make it. And he had made, you know, had such great success in his career. And it might be in part because of the ways in which he assimilated and, you know, like, associated himself with the white American culture. But then you also wonder what the other lingering effects of that are and how that affects the identity of the boys and family and just, like, where that comes from, 100%.
- [43:47]
B
And I would just add that with Both Jose and O.J. i think that a huge reason that they married the women that they did was because they saw they were in love with them. But I also think that it was very important to them to have a beautiful white woman as a wife as sort of their ticket into that society. And I think that that was exactly, as you say, a reflection of their desire to really to assimilate more than anything. It was just that they wanted to be on the inside. They wanted to be in the club.
- [44:16]
A
Yeah. And, you know, looping it back actually full circle to the connection to O.J. and the O.J. case. You know, I kind of want to touch back on those trials and how they intersected with each other for listeners. You know, I know it's been a while since we put out our episodes, so just a reminder that the first Menendez trial ended in a deadlock there's two hung juries because each of the brothers had their own jury. They both were hung. The entire case was reset. There was a whole second trial. By the time that second trial was actually underway, the O.J. simpson case had kind of taken over the national conversation that became the trial of the century. So can you talk about how the O.J. case really shifted the cultural landscape and how it played into how that second Menendez trial was perceived and ultimately how it played out?
- [45:02]
B
The OJ Trial is one of the most fascinating, but also complex trials in American history. I'm not going to get into the details of that, but I will just say that, needless to say, O.J. was acquitted. And it was a shock to most of the whole world because it was widely believed that there was more than abundant forensic blood and witness evidence to convict him of the murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman. So when that happened, it was actually after the Menendez brothers jury had deadlocked, as you referred to in the first trial. That was in 1993, I believe, and the brothers trial was called the trial of the century. Of course, that wasn't the first trial to be called the trial of the century either, right? I mean, you go back to the 20s and the 50s, there was always a trial of the century, but it seems that each one topped the last one. What happened was that when OJ Went on trial and became acquitted, that became the new trial of the century. And I think that there is sort of consensus that the OJ Trial really was much bigger deal even than the Menendez brothers trial was. And it had very profound impacts on the brothers and their situation culturally. They were yesterday's news. Everybody that used to be putting them on the front pages or talking about what was going on in jail or talking about who they were dating lost interest all of a sudden. And everybody was writing about O.J. and Judge Ito and Nicole's family and the Goldmans. And politically within the city of la, it was seen as a disgrace that this case got lost by the district attorney because it was this one case that was supposed to be impossible to lose. And it did come on the heels of another string of relative embarrassments by the DA in other cases and situations that they should have had in their back pocket, including the first Menendez trial. So when the second trial for the brothers came, the judge was the same judge, Judge Wiesburg was the same judge for the first trial. And there was a series of very crucial changes in the rules that were made in sort of a star chamber that is really not well understood today and I think is extremely important in understanding what happened to the brothers because as a result of the changes that were made because of the OJ debacle, the judge in the second trial said there's going to be different rules now. And, and the main one of these different rules is that the evidence that we heard in the first trial, all these 60 witnesses who came out with the stories of physical and sexual and emotional abuse, is not admissible anymore. It's only admissible if, according to the judge, it had direct impact on the brothers leading up to the killing. So if they were abused at the hands of Joseph when they were 6, can't put an end if a cousin saw something when they came to visit, can't put it in. Now, I've been talking a little bit this man, Robert Rand, who wrote the authoritative book on the Menendez brothers and has since become a very strong and passionate advocate of the brothers. And I became friendly because I checked the manifest one day for our West Segoritour and I saw his name. So I was, was just super psyched and I reached out and he enjoyed the tour. And I had been talking him a little bit because my question has always been, do we have a smoking gun? Is there a direct connection between the loss of OJ in the DA's office and Judge Wiesberg in the rule changes? And the short answer to that is no. But circumstantially there's a lot of reasons to think that. But the pressure from the District Attorney's office after the OJ trial was lost was so strong to win the case that it resulted in the rule changes that were imposed by Judge Weisberg. And by the way, one of the main reasons to think that is because the judge himself did used to be a deputy da. This was something that I learned from Robert and actually lost another very high profile case in which he was prosecuting a child who killed his wealthy celebrity executive father. Anyway, as a result of this, the brothers really didn't have a fair trial. Whether or not you are sympathetic with them or with their parents, I think it is fair to say that Eric and Lyle were denied the trial that they were entitled to under the fourth Amendment of the Constitution because of these rule changes that were driven by a desire to at any case have a victory. And it's a tragedy because as a result of that, the brothers, as we know, have been in prison since then and are depending on who you ask, but most people would say that they're model prisoners. Who have shown great character and devotion to their community. But because of politics, they have been living out the rest of their lives in jail. And again, I'm not trying to justify what they did or say that they should have killed their parents or even that they have served their sentence. All I'm trying to say is that the second trial was definitively rigged. And that is something that should never be forgotten. If nothing else, by history and culture.
- [51:05]
A
Definitely. And I really wanted to wrap up, too, I guess, with kind of bringing that to full circle to what's kind of happening right now, you know, like what you're describing. Public sympathy for the brothers has really grown a lot in the last several years. And Eric and Lyle are still in prison. There's still real impacts that all of this cultural conversation has on their lives. And last summer, Eric and Lyle's retrial request was denied, as was their request for parole. What do you think the going on there?
- [51:34]
B
Well, I held myself back in the last answer, but I would venture to say that it's pretty much more of the same. You know, how whenever you have a president, they always want to lower the interest rates, regardless whether they're a Democrat or they're a Republican. For some reason, that's a bipartisan issue. Not that it's good for the economy in the long term, but it's the same thing that we are seeing play out with this current district attorney, Nathan Hockman, which is that he was elected just by bad luck. The brothers on the campaign platform of being much tougher on crime than his predecessor, who was actually voted out because of his stance on being very seen as blacks on crime. What better way to appear tough on crime than to ensure that the Menendez brothers do not get their sentences commuted? And I watched every hearing in every press conference, and I've listened to very close analysis of the events that happened in the parole board hearings, even though they weren't public. And I am convinced personally, I'm not trying to influence your listeners. I don't want to say this is the Graveline position, because this is not factual. But I am convinced personally that just as we saw Garcetti, who was the district attorney in 1994, Lean so heavily on the judge to get a conviction for the brothers, there's a very sadly similar situation that has just played out, denying the brothers parole, they put forth some very weak arguments for why the brothers were not safe to come out of prison, which related to them them having mobile phones. I think there was one argument that one of the Brothers had participated in some tax fraud scheme for a gang, which I think probably, unless you live inside of a penitentiary, is pretty hard to understand why somebody would do that. But if you do live inside a penitentiary, it might not be that hard to understand why somebody would need to do that. And this is the same parole board that said that Sirhan Sirhan, who we don't even think about anymore these days because he's been away for so long for having shot Robert F. Kennedy, should get parole. So by that evaluation standard, it's very hard to square the fact that the brothers wouldn't, after 35 years of serving out sentences that were then recently commuted, also get parole. And I'll just add one really interesting thing, which is the reason that I think was having to come to something that was so obviously sketchy is that the original recommendation of the district attorney was against a habeas petition, which essentially is a retrial. And he was also against a resentencing. And normally when the district attorney makes a recommendation to the judge in any stage state, in any city, the judge accepts it. However, the judge, after the resentencing was recommended, was at such odds with the district attorney for having said that the brothers don't deserve a resentencing, that he boxed the recommendation, which was publicly very humiliating for Nathan Hoffman. So it's almost like a perfect repeat of history. You have the humiliation for the legal procedure that didn't go the way that it was supposed to. And as a result, you have this real clamp down, maybe breaking some of the rules to ensure that that humiliation is undone and the district attorney's power remains unchallenged so that they can get reelected. And it's really, really sad when we've come to a place where justice has to take second place to political concerns. But unfortunately, I think that that's not an isolated situation. And I think it's a very harsh reality of the world that you and I work in and that we all live in.
- [55:45]
A
Definitely. Well, Adam, I really appreciate you taking the time to come on the show, talk about your work, talk about grapevine tours, and to really dive more into this case for people who are obsessed with you, how can they learn more about you? How can they follow your work and, you know, go on one of your tours? Where do they find you?
- [56:04]
B
Well, first of all, if anyone's obsessed with me, don't learn more because I assure you will become bored. You can come on a graveline tour@www.graveline.rip. and if you aren't in the area or don't have plans to travel here in the near future. Please follow us on Instagram. We post content all week long every week at Graveline Tours and we are also on Tik Tok at Graveline Tours RIP and we are just getting a very nascent YouTube channel going whenever I am not doing maintenance or tours and I talk about very interesting old strange murders and our YouTube channel is also Graveline Tours. And I am so grateful to you Celicia for taking the time and it's just an honor because I really do agree with you. I feel like we are kindred spirit within the subset of the world that we operate because we both have the exact same concerns and the exact same takes and it's really been a privilege to be on your show.
- [57:07]
A
Thanks so much Adam. That was my conversation with Adam Paul Levine of Graveline Tours. What I appreciated most about this discussion with Adam is that he doesn't really offer easy answers for us. He sits with this tension, you know, that there always is between curiosity and care and history and harm, between storytelling and also our responsibilities. And I think that tension is where the most honest conversations about True Crime actually live. If you want to learn more about Adam's work, you can find Graveline Tours online and on social media. And if you're ever in Los Angeles, their tours offer a really unique way to engage engage with the city's history and its darker chapters. As always, thank you for listening and for spending your time here with me. And please don't forget, come hang out. Keep up with Truer Crime by following the show on Instagram and xrewercrimepod. You can also subscribe to our newsletter to get first notifications about new season at truercrime.substack.com you can find me Lisa Stanton on Instagram and tag TikTok, where I'm always sharing things like what I'm researching, reading, thinking through as we look ahead to what's next. And if you want a more personal space to hear from me, you can subscribe to my newsletter. Sincerely, Celicia that's where I write about culture, storytelling, and questions that don't always have neat conclusions. Until next time, take care of yourselves and I'll talk to you soon. True Crime is created, hosted and written by me, Celicia Stanton, and is a production of Tenderfoot TV in association with Odyssey. Additional writing, research and production by Olivia Hussingfeld. Executive producers are myself, Donald Albright, and Payne Lindsay. Editing by Liam Luxon artwork by Station 16 original music by Jay Ragsdale and makeup and vanity set mix by Dayton Cole. Thank you to Oren Rosenbaum and the team at uta, the Nord Group and the team at Odyssey. For more podcasts like Truer Crime, search Tenderfoot TV on your favorite podcast app or visit us@Tenderfoot TV. Thanks for listening. Thanks so much for listening to this episode of True Crime. If you want an ad free version of the show, plus early access to every episode for this month's case and tons of other great Tenderfoot podcasts, you can subscribe to Tenderfoot plus at tenderfootplus.com or on Apple Podcasts. It's a small way to support the work, and it makes a big difference.
- [60:07]
B
This time of year, everyone talks about going dry, but at Athletic Brewing Co. We're skipping that because we prefer going athletic, which isn't dry at all. From crisp goldens to hoppy IPAs and limited releases in between, you'll find something.
- [60:20]
A
That fits your style.
- [60:22]
B
Every single non alcoholic brew is packed with flavor and the same craft experience you love.
- [60:26]
A
So yeah, you could call it dry.
- [60:28]
B
But there's really nothing dry about it. Find your new favorite near beer@athleticalbrewing.com Athletic Brewing Co. Fit for all times.