The Wild, True Tale Behind ‘Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story’

On Friday, Monster—an anthology series from super-producer Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan that explores the psychology of society’s most deplorable figures—returns to Netflix for its second installment. Last time, the show covered Jeffrey Dahmer. This time around, Murphy and Brennan are casting their lens on not one, but two “monsters” in Lyle and Erik Menendez, the brothers who were sentenced to life in prison without parole after being found guilty of murdering their parents, José and Mary Louise “Kitty” Menendez. The brothers claim their crime was self-defense after enduring years of psychological, emotional, and sexual abuse at the hands of their father.

Newcomers Nicholas Alexander Chavez and Cooper Koch play Lyle and Erik, respectively, while Oscar-winner Javier Bardem and Oscar-nominee Chloë Sevigny play José and Kitty.

When trying to decide on a follow-up to Dahmer, Murphy and Brennan found inspiration in the unlikeliest of places: TikTok. “There are literally thousands and thousands and thousands of TikToks from young people, specifically young women, talking about the Lyle and Erik Menendez case,” Murphy said during a Q&A after a recent screening in New York of the series’ first episode.

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The renewed interest in the Menendez brothers, Brennan believes, might have something to do with how society’s views have evolved since the ’90s. “We finally have a vernacular to think about and discuss sex abuse and mental health that did not exist at the time,” said Brennan. “I think that feels really electric for a certain age group, who looks back at their parents’ generation and is like, ‘What were you doing? You don’t know how to see the world.’”

On the surface, the Menendez family appeared to be the American dream personified. After emigrating to the US from Cuba at the tail end of the Cuban Revolution, José met and married Kitty while attending Southern Illinois University. Joseph “Lyle” Menendez was born in 1968, and Erik Galen Menendez in 1970. By way of José’s corporate job in the home video industry, the family climbed the socioeconomic ladder and moved from suburban New Jersey to Beverly Hills while the boys were teenagers. But underneath their picture-perfect facade—Lyle matriculated to Princeton, while Erik was a nationally ranked junior tennis player—a nightmare was brewing.

Erik and Lyle were 18 and 21 when they gunned down their parents in the den of their Beverly Hills mansion on August 20, 1989. After they were arrested for the murders in March of 1990, two competing narratives emerged. The prosecution maintained that the boys murdered their parents to inherit their immense wealth—and cited as evidence their wild spending after the murders, with Lyle buying a Rolex and a Porsche Carrera in the immediate aftermath. Erik, meanwhile, hired a full-time tennis coach and traveled to Israel to compete in tournaments. But their defense attorney, Leslie Abramson—played in the series by Ari Graynor—argued that Erik and Lyle were emotionally, psychologically, and sexually abused by José, torment that was ignored by the alcoholic and pill-popping Kitty. According to their teary testimony, Lyle and Erik claimed that their father threatened to kill them if they ever came forward about the abuse, which led them to commit their heinous act.

Initially, Lyle and Erik were tried simultaneously with separate juries. Both ended in a deadlock and were declared mistrials. They were subsequently tried together, in a new trial presided over by Judge Stanley Weisberg, who limited the inclusion of sexual assault testimony. In 1996, Lyle and Erik were found guilty of two counts of first-degree murder and conspiracy to murder. Both brothers are currently serving life sentences at Richard J. Donovan correctional facility.

“I think that sexual abuse, particularly male sexual abuse, is not something that really a lot of people in the media have talked about,” Murphy said. “I think this is going to launch many, many discussions about that.”

In creating the controversial series, Murphy maintained that staying true to the facts was paramount. “All the stuff in here, by the way, is true,” he said. “We spent many, many, many years researching this.” As is often the case with sensational stories, that includes some of the wildest and most unbelievable details found in the Netflix series.

Wing Stop

The first episode of Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story thrusts us directly into the belly of the beast, opening with the brothers in the back of a limo on the way to a memorial service for their recently deceased parents. Erik struggles to hold himself together, while Lyle manically daydreams about owning and running a buffalo wing franchise. While this sounds absurd, the elder Menendez brother really was quite passionate about chicken wings, going so far as to buy the spicy chicken wings spot Chuck’s Spring Street Cafe, in Princeton, New Jersey, after the murders, and renaming it Mr. Buffalo. His Princeton suitemate, Hayden Rogers, even worked for Mendedez as the restaurant’s CFO for a spell.

“He called me up and—I was working in construction—and he called me up and asked me if I would be interested in managing a restaurant he was looking at buying,” Rogers explained to Roll Call in 2012. “I went up, talked about it, decided it was a good opportunity, so I went to work for him.” Rogers was with Lyle on the day of his arrest. “We had actually gone out to California, he and I and another fella, to, if I remember, look for another location to potentially expand the restaurant somewhere near UCLA,” Rogers said. “It was a pretty unusual situation to find yourself in, but we were with him on our way to eat lunch when he got arrested.”

Blame It on the Rain

Wings were just the tip of the iceberg for Lyle. The series premiere paints Lyle as the more extroverted, more intense brother, played with aplomb by Chavez. No moment in the premiere captures Lyle’s bravado better than the eulogy he gives for his parents at the memorial service, which ends with the most bizarre needle drop: Milli Vanilli’s “Girl I’m Gona Miss You.” According to Emmy-winning reporter Robert Rand, who wrote the book The Menendez Murders: The Shocking Untold Story of the Menendez Family and the Killings That Stunned the Nation and co-executive produced the Peacock docuseries Menendez + Menudo: Boys Betrayed, this cringey moment actually happened in real life. “The Milli Vanilli song ‘Miss You’ was also played at the Directors Guild memorial service for Jose and Kitty, parents of the #MenendezBrothers, on August 25, 1989, 35 years ago this week,” Rand posted on X on August 20.

“The choice of Lyle playing a Milli Vanilli song at his parents’ memorial—you really can’t make up,” said Murphy, who named the premiere episode after another Milli Vanilli song, “Blame It on the Rain,” which plays as the credits roll.

Hair-Raising

Lyle’s blustering swagger hides his insecurity, laid bare during another shocking moment from the episode. In the midst of a family argument, Kitty gets up from the dinner table and rips Lyle’s toupee clean off his head, leaving the eldest Menendez brother bald and broken. According to late writer Dominick Dunne, who covered the Menendez trial for Vanity Fair and is played on Monster by Tony-winner Nathan Lane, this actually happened.

“On the Tuesday before the Sunday of the killings, Kitty, we were told way back in the opening statements in July, pulled off Lyle Menendez’s hairpiece in a fit of rage during a family argument,” wrote Dunne in 1994. Dunne describes the toupee as a “state of the art hairpiece” and called Lyle’s “virtually undetectable false hair a masterpiece of wigmaking.” It reportedly cost Lyle a pretty penny too. Per Dunne’s reporting, Lyle first went to the Hair Replacement Center on Wilshire Boulevard in West Los Angeles on February 4, 1988. “He was already in possession of a toupee, with which he was dissatisfied, claiming it shed,” wrote Dunne. “The new model he ordered cost $1,450. He got a trade-in of $400 for his used toupee.”

According to Dunne, Lyle returned to the hair replacement center three more times over the next year and a half, and always insisted that his wig be made of 100% human hair. “Lyle always knew exactly what he wanted and exactly how high the piece should be placed on his forehead,” wrote Dunne. “On one, he ordered a permanent wave. On another, he requested sun-streaking and highlights.” According to an interview Dunne conducted with an employee at the hair replacement center, Lyle wasn’t a fan of the toupee, and found it “hot and perspiry,” but wore it to appease his father. “‘You don’t have to wear it. No one’s forcing you to wear it,’” the employee once said to Lyle, according to Dunne. Lyle’s reply? “I have an image to keep up. My father told me I had an image.”

The wig was so convincing that apparently Erik didn’t know his brother wore a hairpiece until his mother ripped it off. “That one brother did not know the other brother wore a hairpiece was hard to swallow,” wrote Dunne. The wig snatching was, Dunne believed, a catalyst to the terrible events that would follow. “That aggressive act and the shock that followed set in motion the events that ended with a fusillade of fire that killed the two parents.” True to form, in the episode, Koch’s Erik cites that incident as the moment he and Lyle commit to killing their parents.

Match Point

While Lyle’s turbulent relationship with his parents is shown via his hair loss, Erik’s is illustrated on the tennis court. In a flashback, we see Bardem’s José berate Erik during a tennis match after double faulting, verbally assaulting his son and losing his cool with the referee. Tennis was a major part of the Menendezes’ story, with Lyle playing on the Princeton men’s tennis team before he was eventually suspended for plagiarism, and Erik ranking as high as 44th in the US as a junior. Two weeks before the murders, Erik entered the 1989 Boys Junior National Championship and reached the second round in the Boys 18 singles. “One of the things I really want to know is, did he actually really like tennis or was that something that was really forced upon him?” said Koch at the Q&A.

And How Does That Make You Feel?

While Lyle is portrayed as the bolder of the two brothers, Koch’s Erik is softer and more damaged, haunted by their actions to the point of suicide. It’s Erik who, months after the murders, first confesses to his therapist Dr. Oziel (Dallas Roberts) that he and his brother murdered their parents. Erik tearfully confesses to Oziel under the assumption that he’ll be safe under the protection of patient-client privilege. At Oziel’s request, Lyle joins the appointment, and after Erik reveals that he told Oziel, Lyle violently threatens Oziel.

Despite the bounds of patient-client privilege, due to a ruling the year prior in the California Supreme Court, Oziel was permitted to testify against the brothers on the grounds that the rule of confidentiality was violated after they allegedly threatened him. According to an LA Times report by Alan Abrahamson regarding Dr. Oziel’s testimony, Monsters stayed true to the order of events that took place on Halloween in 1989, when Erik first told Oziel about the murders. “Upon arrival, Erik Menendez said he had been having nightmares, ‘very vivid images of his parents being dead,’ Oziel testified. After a while, Oziel said, he and Erik Menendez went for a walk, used the bathroom at a local restaurant and then sat down on a nearby park bench,” wrote Abrahamson. “After talking there for a bit, they headed back to Oziel’s office. At the front door to the building, Oziel said, Erik Menendez leaned back against a parking meter and said, ‘We did it. We killed our parents.’”

As portrayed on the series, Oziel enlists his mistress Judalon Smyth (Leslie Grossman) to eavesdrop on the Menendez brother’s confession, having her listen through the door as the brothers tell their therapist what they had done. At the time, there was some dispute as to exactly how Smyth learned of the brothers’ confession, and ultimately, was able to tip off the police. According to Abrahamson, Oziel claimed that he “did not believe that Smyth was in his office Oct. 31, eavesdropping on the nearly four-hour session he had with the Menendez brothers.”

“Later that night, he said, he went to her home and told her ‘what I felt I needed to tell her,’” wrote Abrahamson. However, according to an appeals court opinion on the case, Smyth claimed that she had been in Oziel’s office on October 31 and that Oziel instructed her to eavesdrop while he met with the brothers—which matches how the incident is portrayed on the series.

The first episode of Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story only scratches the surface of the scandal. To approach a story so complicated and dark, Murphy and Brennan instigated a “Rashomon approach,” exploring all aspects from the various perspectives of the characters. “Every episode shifts perspective to a certain degree, where we ask you as the audience to make the decision about what really happened,” said Murphy. “Because we’re going off research and theories and court testimony and research that nobody else has access to.”

But even for all their painstaking research, they know that ultimately the truth is unknowable. “There were four people who knew really what happened, and two of them are dead,” said Murphy. “It’s a roller coaster of empathy and rage,” added Brennan. “I don’t know who I believe right now anymore, and I still struggle with it. It’s a not-knowable story.”