I have not thought a lot concerning the Menendez brothers, Lyle and Erik, since they had been convicted in 1996 of murdering their mother and father, Jose and Kitty, of their Beverly Hills mansion.
On the time of the murders, Lyle was 21 and Erik 18.
The prosecution claimed they had been grasping, spoiled brats attempting to get their arms on their mother and father’ fortune. The protection argued that they had been severely abused by their father, who was enabled by their mom, and so they had been in concern of their lives.
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Opinion columnist
Robin Abcarian
The household’s horrific story was one chapter of a very traumatic period in Los Angeles, when the prison justice system appeared strained to its limits, the place controversies about systemic racism, privilege, home violence and justice raged on the airwaves, at dinner tables and across the water. coolers.
I would go as far as to say that the Nineties in LA basically started on the August night time in 1989 when the Menendez brothers snuck up on their mother and father and blew them away with shotguns whereas the couple watched TV and ate ice cream. Six months later, the brothers, who had managed to spend greater than $1 million of their mother and father’ cash within the meantime, had been arrested.
A 12 months later, George Holliday videotaped the brutal beating of motorist Rodney King by LAPD officers, and the officers’ acquittals sparked days of fires, looting and spasmodic violence.
In 1994—the identical 12 months as two Menendez juries, one for every younger man deadlocked between manslaughter and homicide convictions—Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman had been hacked to demise in Brentwood. After a unstable trial, Simpson’s ex-husband, OJ Simpson, was acquitted of the murders in 1995.
The second Menendez trial, this time with one jury, additionally started in 1995. The identical decide, who had beforehand allowed the protection to name 50 witnesses and current proof of abuse, restricted testimony that might have supported an “abuse excuse” within the second lawsuit. . That sealed the destiny of the brothers. They had been convicted of first diploma homicide in March 1996 and have been in jail for 33 years.
I’d keep that this convulsive period ended the next 12 months when a civil jury in Santa Monica discovered Simpson answerable for the deaths of his ex-wife and her pal.
I inform you, it was an emotional and exhausting time on this metropolis. Nothing any of us wish to relive.
However the angle in the direction of home violence and intercourse abuse has modified. New proof concerning the Menendez household has come to gentle and now, resigned to dying in jail, the brothers hope the case will probably be reopened.
A petition filed in Los Angeles County Superior Court docket in Could particulars two new items of related proof that corroborate Lyle and Erik’s claims that their father was a violent monster and that their mom did nothing to cease him.
One is a letter written by 17-year-old Erik to his cousin, through which he discusses his father’s abuse. “I by no means know when it will occur and it drives me loopy,” Erik wrote to his cousin, Andy Cano. “Each night time I keep up considering he may are available in.”
The second is an allegation by Roy Rosselló, a former member of the Puerto Rican boy band Menudo, that Jose Menendez, who was the CEO of RCA Data on the time, raped him when he was 13.
A decide has but to rule on the brothers’ petition, which asks for both an evidentiary listening to or for the convictions and sentences to be vacated.
(Rosselló has additionally alleged that Menudo’s founder, Edgardo Díaz, repeatedly raped him between 1983 and 1986 when he was a member of the group. The LAPD confirmed to my colleague Salvador Hernandez that Díaz is underneath investigation for an incident Rosselló says came about on the Biltmore Resort, the place he says Díaz attacked him.Rosselló’s troubled historical past and Menudo’s connection to Jose Menendez are explored in a strong new three-part docuseries “Menendez + Menudo: Boys Betrayed” by veteran journalists Robert Rand, creator of “The Menendez” Murders,” and Nery Ynclan.)
Rand has been writing concerning the Menendez case for the reason that day after the murders and has developed shut ties to the brothers’ prolonged household, most of whom imagine Lyle and Erik have served lengthy sufficient. It was Rand who found the letter, written by Erik, that will play a task within the reopening of the case.
“They’d have been out a very long time in the past if that they had a good trial,” mentioned Kitty Menendez’s older sister, Joan VanderMolen, 91, who lives in Ventura. In “Menendez + Menudo”, she and her daughter Diane talk about why Erik seemed like a baby when there have been no lemons in the home. “It was to get the style of semen out of his mouth,” Joan says in one of many documentary’s extra surprising moments.
“I cherished my sister dearly,” VanderMolen informed me final week, “and it is laborious to speak about her, however by some means she managed to let this husband of hers rule and beat the youngsters. She needed to know.”
She speaks repeatedly together with her nephews on the cellphone on the Richard J. Donovan Correctional Facility close to San Diego, the place they had been allowed to be collectively after 22 years aside. “That they had a horrible childhood,” she mentioned. “Cash had nothing to do with it.”
Who desires to delve again into the malaise of LA within the Nineties? Not me. However all these years later, with insights from the #MeToo motion too contemporary to disregard and new proof at hand, reopening the case in opposition to Erik and Lyle Menendez looks like the suitable factor to do.