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.

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.

Cooper Koch and Nicholas Alexander Chavez as Erik and Lyle Menendez in Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story

COURTESY OF NETFLIX

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.