Erik and Lyle Menendez are serving out their life sentences at the RJ Donovan Correctional Facility in San Diego, California, according to the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. The brothers are not eligible for parole.
After their conviction, the two men were transferred to separate prisons. The last time they saw each other was in 1996, when they could see each other across the prison yard but couldn’t communicate. Separate transports took them to different facilities.
Over the years, Lyle repeatedly requested a transfer closer to his brother. On February 22, 2018, he was moved from Mule Creek State Prison in Northern California to San Diego’s Richard J. Donovan Correctional Facility, where Erik had been incarcerated since 2013.
On April 4, 2018, the brothers were finally reunited when Erik moved to Lyle’s unit. Journalist Robert Rand told ABC News that when the guard opened the door, Lyle saw his brother, and they both “burst into tears immediately.”
“They just hugged each other for a few minutes without saying any words to each other,” Rand added. “Then the prison officials let them spend an hour together in a room.”
In January 2017, Lyle told ABC News that he had come to terms with his actions. “I am the kid that did kill his parents, and no river of tears has changed that and no amount of regret has changed it,” he explained. “I accept that. You are often defined by a few moments of your life, but that’s not who you are in your life, you know. Your life is your totality of it...You can’t change it. You just, you’re stuck with the decisions you made.”
Lyle still claims that they experienced abuse by their father, which he said bonded him and his brother Erik through secrets. “It’s so painful and complicated and confusing,” he said. “We have an intimacy related to that shared experience… [and] the bond become very great and intense.”
“I’m the older brother so I find myself trying to protect Erik quite a bit through childhood, but pretty much trying to survive,” Lyle continued. “It was pretty crushing to in the end to realize that I had not been able to protect to or save him from such horrible abuse as I thought. I thought we had sort of survived early childhood pretty well and that turned out not to be true.”
While Erik declined to be interviewed by ABC News in 2017, he told ABC’s Barbara Walters in a 1996 interview that he felt “tremendous remorse” for the killings. “There’s not a day that goes by that I don’t think about what happened and wish I could take that moment back,” he said at the time.
What Is The New Evidence Supporting Lyle and Erik Mendendez’s Allegations of Abuse?
The question now isn’t whether Lyle and Erik Menendez killed their parents but rather whether they did so in fear and self-defense after enduring a lifetime of abuse. New evidence could support this claim, and the brothers’ defense attorney, Cliff Gardner, is hoping to secure their release.
The newly surfaced evidence includes a letter Gardner claims was written by Erik Menendez to his cousin, Andy Cano, in December 1988 — about eight months before the crime — according to CBS News.
Part of the letter reads, “I’ve been trying to avoid dad. It’s still happening, Andy, but it’s worse for me now. … Every night I stay up thinking he might come in. … I’m afraid. … He’s crazy. He’s warned me a hundred times about telling anyone, especially Lyle.”
Andy Cano testified at the brothers’ trials and said that Erik told him — years before the killing — that his father was touching him inappropriately. However, prosecutors at trial suggested that Cano was lying, CBS News reported.
On April 2023, Roy Rosselló, a former member of the Puerto Rican boy band Menudo, alleged that Erik and Lyle’s father, Jose, sexually assaulted him as a teenager.
In a sworn affidavit filed in 2023, Rosselló said that he visited Jose Menendez’s home in the fall of 1983 or 1984 as a teenager. He said he drank “a glass of wine” and then felt like he had “no control” over his body. He alleged that Jose took him to a room and raped him. Rossello also stated in the affidavit that Jose sexually abused him in two other instances.
“I know what he did to me in his house,” Rosselló said in the Peacock docuseries Menendez + Menudo: Boys Betrayed, according to People. “That’s the man here that raped me... That’s the pedophile.”
Erik responded to Rosselló’s claim in a phone call with Rand, the journalist who has kept in touch with the brothers. “It’s sad to know that there was another victim of my father. I always hoped and believed that one day the truth about my dad would come out, but I never wished for it to come out like this – the result of trauma that another child has suffered,” he said.
In May 2023, Gardner filed a habeas petition, presenting the letter and Rossello’s affidavit as new evidence that argues his clients’ convictions should be overturned. The Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office told “48 Hours,” that it is investigating the claims made in the habeas petition, per CBS News.
Watch the official trailer for Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story below.
