Yahoo Lifestyle Erik Menendez Admits Lying to Police About Parents' 1989 Shooting: 'We Should Have Been Arrested That Night'
Erik and Lyle Menendez spend hours talking to director Alejandro Hartmann from prison in the new Netflix documentary 'The Menendez Brothers,' streaming Oct. 7
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Erik Menendez, with his attorney Leslie Abramson and his brother, Lyle MenendezOn a sultry August night in 1989, police sirens pierced the tranquility of the usually quiet Beverly Hills neighborhood where the Menendez family lived.
Police had just gotten a hysterical call from a sobbing Lyle Mendendez, then 21, who screamed into the phone, “They shot and killed my parents!”
Police raced to the $5 million home, where they found the bloodied bodies of Kitty and Jose Menendez, shot to death in their TV room.
The wealthy couple’s sons, Lyle and Erik, 18, told officers they had returned home from a night out at the movies when they found the carnage inside.
The horrific events of that night, as well as what happened before and in the aftermath, are the focus of the new Netflix documentary, The Menendez Brothers.
Streaming Monday, Oct. 7, the documentary features audio interviews from prison with Erik, 53, and Lyle, 56, who has not spoken publicly since he and his brother sat down with Barbara Walters in June 1996, shortly after their first trial ended in a mistrial.
Looking back, Erik tells director Alejandro Hartmann — in calls from California’s Donovan Correctional Facility, where he and Lyle are now incarcerated — that he cannot believe he and his brother weren’t taken into custody that night.
“There should have been a police response and we would have been arrested,” Erik says in the documentary. “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.”
Police made no arrests that night. After a lengthy investigation, authorities arrested Lyle and Erik in March 1990, charging them with first-degree murder in the deaths of their parents, Kitty, 47, a stay-at-home mom, and Jose, 45, a hard-driving Hollywood music executive.
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During their first trial in 1993, which ended in mistrial, the brothers testified that they killed their parents after years of alleged sexual abuse by their Hollywood executive father, which they claim their mother ignored.
In 1996, they were sentenced to life in prison without parole.
The high-profile riveted the nation from the moment the public learned about it. It still fascinates today. The sensational case is the subject of season 2 of Ryan Murphy’s Netflix show Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story, starring Javier Bardem and Chloë Sevigny.
It is also the focus of The Mendendez Brothers Official Podcast, debuting Oct. 9, on Netflix's "You Can't Make This Up."
On the night of Aug. 20, 1989, hours before they told police they were shocked to find their parents' bullet-riddled bodies, the brothers burst into the room where the two were watching TV and opened fire with 12-gauge shotguns.
Before the brothers left the house, they made sure to clean up the spent shells all over the floor.
After calling 911, an army of officers, detectives, crime scene technicians and others scoured the scene for evidence. Erik was certain one of them would find out he and his brother were the ones who had killed their parents.
“There were shells, gun shells in my car," Eric says in the documentary. "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.”
Prosecutor Pamela Bozanich, who tried the 1993 case, says sarcastically in the documentary, “Beverly Hills is a different kind of police department. They have much better customer service.”
The Menendez Brothers airs on Netflix on Oct. 7.
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