On This Day: August 20, 1989 — The Night the Menendez Brothers Shot Their Parents

By 11 PM on Sunday, August 20, 1989, Jose Menendez — a 45-year-old Cuban immigrant who had clawed his way from Havana to Hollywood and built a $14 million fortune — was dead in the den of his Beverly Hills mansion. His wife Kitty, 47, lay beside him. Both had been shot multiple times at point-blank range with 12-gauge shotguns. The killers had walked in through the back door.

They were the couple’s own sons.

The Family Behind the Gates at 722 North Elm Drive

Jose Menendez arrived in the United States as a teenager with almost nothing. He earned a swimming scholarship, graduated from Southern Illinois University, and spent the next three decades building a career in American corporate life. By the late 1980s, he was running LIVE Entertainment, a Los Angeles film and music company, after a stint as head of U.S. operations for Hertz and, before that, president of RCA Records — where he signed Duran Duran and the Eurythmics.

The family lived in a 9,063-square-foot Mediterranean-style villa at 722 North Elm Drive in Beverly Hills. Lyle, the elder son, had recently left Princeton University. Erik, the younger, was a serious junior tennis player. By every visible measure, they had the kind of life that advertising agencies invent.

What happened inside that house is still debated. The facts of the killings, however, are not.

What Happened on August 20, 1989

On that Sunday evening, Erik and Lyle entered the den where Jose and Kitty were watching television. They were carrying two 12-gauge shotguns purchased days earlier from a Big 5 Sporting Goods in San Diego — bought under a false name to avoid a paper trail. Jose was shot six times in the head and body. Kitty was shot multiple times while trying to escape the room.

The brothers then drove to Mulholland Drive and threw the shotguns over the canyon edge. They went to a movie — Batman, playing nearby. When they returned home, Lyle called 911.

“Someone killed my parents,” he said into the phone.

Police arrived to find both brothers weeping on the front lawn. Detectives initially focused on Jose’s business dealings — he had a reputation for sharp elbows in the entertainment industry, and the shotgun-style execution suggested professional motivation. For months, the Menendez sons were treated as grieving heirs, not suspects.

The Spending Spree That Made Everyone Look Twice

Four days after the murders, Lyle and Erik walked into a Beverly Hills jeweler and spent $15,000 on three Rolex watches. They wore them to their parents’ funeral.

That was the beginning. Within six months, the brothers burned through roughly $700,000 of their inheritance. Lyle bought a $64,000 Porsche and put a $300,000 deposit on a restaurant in Princeton, New Jersey — a place he’d barely graduated from. Erik hired a $50,000 personal tennis coach, invested $40,000 in a rock concert that failed, and bought a new Jeep. There were ski trips, exotic vacations, and enough spending that it registered as conspicuous even by Beverly Hills standards.

Prosecutors would later argue this spending spree was the whole point — that the brothers had killed for the money. The defense would offer a very different explanation. But in the fall of 1989, the spending was what first made Beverly Hills police look harder at Jose’s sons.

A Therapist, a Tape Recorder, and a Betrayal

In October 1989, Erik Menendez began seeing Dr. L. Jerome Oziel, a Beverly Hills psychotherapist. During those sessions, he confessed to his role in his parents’ murders. Oziel, recognizing what he was hearing, arranged for both brothers to come in together — and then secretly recorded their confessions.

What Oziel did with that tape was not report it to the police. He held it, apparently as leverage in a troubled personal situation. Oziel was having an affair with a woman named Judalon Smyth, and when their relationship deteriorated in early 1990, Smyth went to Beverly Hills police and told them about the tapes.

On March 8, 1990, police arrested Lyle Menendez outside the mansion on North Elm Drive. Erik was arrested days later while competing in a tennis tournament in Israel. The Rolex-and-Porsche phase was over.

The Trial That Launched Court TV

The first Menendez murder trial began in July 1993. Court TV, then a young cable network still finding its footing, broadcast every hour of testimony. Within weeks, more than 1.3 million Americans were watching daily — not a sporting event, not a soap opera, but a murder trial. Defense attorney Leslie Abramson became a household name. The brothers, in jackets and ties, sat at the defense table and told a story no one had expected.

They admitted to the killings. Then they said why.

According to Erik, Jose had sexually abused him from age six to eighteen. According to Lyle, the abuse started when he was six and continued for several years before Jose moved his attentions to his younger son. The brothers testified that on the night of August 20, they had come to believe Jose planned to kill them rather than let his secret become public.

The prosecution called it greed dressed up as trauma. Prosecutors pointed to the spending, the false alibi, the premeditated purchase of the shotguns across county lines. The defense pointed to years of alleged abuse and argued imperfect self-defense — that the brothers genuinely, if irrationally, believed they were acting to save their own lives.

Both juries deadlocked. The first trial ended in mistrial.

The case ran in parallel to a broader moment in American culture. Jeffrey Dahmer had been arrested in 1991, and true crime was becoming a genre unto itself. The courtroom had replaced the movie theater as the place where the country worked out its anxieties about violence and privilege. The Menendez case was Beverly Hills, shotguns, and the most fundamental American story there is: what really goes on inside a beautiful house.

Conviction and the Shadow of OJ

The retrial began in October 1995, this time without television cameras and with a judge who restricted how much the abuse allegations could dominate the proceedings. Lyle, facing evidence that he’d asked friends to fabricate testimony on his behalf, did not take the stand. The jury deliberated and returned first-degree murder convictions for both brothers in March 1996. They were sentenced to life without the possibility of parole.

By then, the country had moved on. OJ Simpson’s white Bronco had already rewritten everything anyone thought they knew about the relationship between celebrity, race, and criminal justice. The Menendez case felt, by comparison, almost quaint — two wealthy kids who wanted their money faster. The guilty verdicts landed without much ceremony.

The two brothers have spent the decades since in California state prisons, both marrying while incarcerated, both maintaining the abuse claims that the second jury was not allowed to fully hear.

Kitty and Jose, and the Question That Won’t Settle

What makes the Menendez case resistant to easy summary is Kitty. Jose, in the defense narrative, was the abuser — domineering, controlling, the central figure in the brothers’ alleged ordeal. But Kitty also died that night, shot while trying to flee the room, and the brothers’ explanation for that has never been as cleanly argued. The prosecution’s position — that Kitty was killed because she was a witness who could not be left alive — is the simpler accounting of that part of the evening.

The trial established two competing Americas in that Beverly Hills den: one where money and control can produce violence that looks, from the outside, like a comfortable family, and one where two adult men chose the shotgun over any other available option. Thirty-five years later, both versions still have adherents.

The Case Refuses to Stay Buried

In 2024, Netflix released a documentary in which both brothers, via audio interviews from prison, spoke publicly about the case for the first time in decades. Ryan Murphy’s dramatization Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story drew tens of millions of viewers and reignited the debate about whether the abuse claims, never fully tested in the second trial, should matter now. A petition to resentence the brothers collected hundreds of thousands of signatures.

In May 2025, Judge Michael Jesic reduced both sentences from life without parole to 50 years to life, making the brothers eligible for parole. Both were subsequently denied at their first hearings — prison disciplinary records, including cellphone use and alcohol violations, counted against them. Their next hearings are scheduled in three years.

The murders happened on a Sunday night in August 1989. The story is still not over.

Sources

1. History.com — The Menendez Brothers Murder Their Parents, August 20, 1989
2. Biography.com — The Menendez Brothers: Why They Killed Their Parents Is Still Debated
3. E! Online — How the Menendez Brothers Murder Trial Put Court TV on the Entertainment Map
4. Refinery29 — Menendez Brothers Money Spent After Murder
5. NPR — Menendez Brothers Resentencing, May 2025