Nearly a month after the release of Ryan Murphy’s talked-about series “Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story,” Netflix has just dropped a documentary on the two brothers, who are serving life sentences without parole for the 1989 murders of their parents.
The doc gives a platform for Lyle and Erik to share their side of the story, including audio interviews with the brothers from prison.
Looking back on the murder, Erik admitted he was surprised that they weren’t taken into custody on the night of the gruesome murders.
He told director Alejandro Hartmann, “There should have been a police response, and we would have been arrested. We had no alibi. The gunpowder residue was all over our hands. Under normal circumstances, they give you a gunpowder residue test and we would have been arrested immediately.”
After they killed their parents, Lyle called 911, telling the dispatcher, “Someone killed my parents.”
Once detectives and police arrived, the brothers believed that they would be arrested, due to the incriminating evidence.
Erik explained, “There were shells, gun shells, in my car. My car was inside the search area. All they had to do was search my car. They were searching everything."
“And if they would've just pressed me, I wouldn't have been able to withstand any questioning. I was in a completely broken and shattered state of mind. I was shell-shocked,” Erik admitted.
The two weren’t arrested until seven months after the killings.
It was reported that the brothers spent $700,000 after the murders and before their arrest. Lyle bought a Porsche Carrera, Rolex watches, and a New Jersey restaurant, while Erik forked over money for a tennis coach and a Jeep.
The two insist that they weren’t living it up after the murders.
In a phone call from prison, Erik said, “The idea that I was having a good time is absurd. Everything was to cover up this horrible pain of not wanting to be alive.”
Lyle argued, “I was not enjoying myself as a playboy... I was actually sobbing a lot at night, sleeping poorly, very distraught at times, and kind of adrift throughout this, all those months.”
Following the murders, Erik claims that he was suicidal, saying, “One of the things that kept me from killing myself is that I was, I felt like I would be a complete failure to my dad at that point.”
In the doc, the brothers maintain that their father’s alleged sexual abuse led to the murders.
Erik takes the blame for their decision to kill their parents after he told Lyle about the alleged sexual abuse that he suffered at the hands of their father, saying, "I went to the only person who had ever helped me, that ever protected me. Ultimately this happened because of me, because I went to [Lyle]."
Expressing guilt, Erik added, "And then afterwards, lets just be honest, he was arrested because of me because I told [his therapist] Dr Oziel, because I couldn't live with what I did. I couldn't live with it, I wanted to die. In a way I did not protect Lyle, I got him into every aspect of this tragedy, every aspect of this tragedy is my fault."
According to the doc, the brothers did everything they could to stay in the same prison, including an interview with the late Barbara Walters in 1996.
Lyle explained that they sat down for the “very unusual” TV interview to “try to plead that they not separate us and show how much we did not want that to happen.”
In the interview with Walters, Erik got emotional, saying, “There’s a good probability I will never see him again... (There are) some things that you cannot take, and there's some things that you can endure. With everything taken away, it would be the last thing you can take.”
Despite their public plea, the brothers were separated.
Erik recalled in the Netflix doc, “They put him in one van. I didn't understand why they were putting me in another van. I started screaming out to Lyle and they shut the door. It was the last time I, I saw him.”
Lyle added, “Our start to prison life was tremendously painful. My brother actually went on a hunger strike to try to keep us together.”
They eventually got their wish and were reunited in 2018 after Lyle was transferred to the same prison as Erik.
Lyle shared, "I fought for decades to be reunited with my brother. Now we are in the same facility I see him everyday and we talk, we are very close. It took 21 years, it was really in large part because of the change in societal attitudes about the case and child sex abuse of boys."
Lyle and Erik have served nearly 35 years in prison after being convicted in 1996.
“The Menendez Brothers” is streaming now on Netflix.
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