The Menendez Brothers Pt. 1

Due to the nature of this case, listener discretion is advised.

This episode includes discussions of sexual assault, violence, and murder.

Consider this when deciding how and when you'll listen.

Jose Menendez dragged his sons up the driveway of a mansion by the scruffs of their necks.

Lyle and Eric grimaced, but didn't resist.

They knew better than to argue when their father was this upset.

Jose let go of his sons, took a deep breath, and knocked twice.

A wealthy, middle-aged woman opened the door.

He apologized for bothering her and introduced himself as the father of two delinquents.

He said his boys had stolen nearly $100,000 worth of jewelry from her home.

The woman's eyes grew wide as she watched Lyle and Eric pull gold and silver chains from their pockets and hold them out to her.

Jose said his sons had already pawned some items and spent the cash, but he would pay her back the exact amount that had been lost if she promised not to press charges.

Still in shock, the woman agreed.

Jose reached in his pocket and wrote her a check for $11,000.

All this humiliation for pocket change.

Driving back to their own mansion, Lyle and Eric sulked in the back seat.

They waited for Jose to say something, anything, but he was silent the entire drive.

When they finally parked outside their house, he turned around, locked eyes with his sons, and told them: If you ever embarrass me like that again,

I'll kill both of you.

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Jose Enrique Menendez was born in Havana, Cuba in 1944, the third child of Jose Francisco and Maria Carlota.

He had big shoes to fill.

His father was a famous soccer star and his mother was an Olympic swimmer, the first woman ever inducted into the Cuban Hall of Fame.

They were a high-status family with deep pockets and substantial social influence.

But when Fidel Castro came to power in 1959, nearly all of the family's property was seized.

The following year, 16-year-old Jose fled Havana to live with relatives in Pennsylvania.

As a teenager, he was depressed and angry.

In his mind, his family's wealth had been stolen, his comfortable life unjustly cut short.

When he first arrived in the States, he spent hours locked up in his room listening to Cuban radio.

The stations spouted non-stop pro-Castro propaganda, but this only stoked the fires of Jose's rage.

He hardly talked to anyone outside of his family, and when he did, he refused to speak English.

Establishing trust after having his family's wealth seized wasn't easy, but this also led Jose to champion property protections that were popular in the U.S.

He soon realized that America, unlike Castro's Cuba, was a culture in which an individualist, capitalist ideology could flourish.

In fact, Jose became obsessed with the American dream.

He made it his life's work to regain the money and status he believed he was entitled to.

With an insatiable hunger for success, Jose graduated high school and enrolled at Southern Illinois University on a swimming scholarship in 1962.

During his sophomore year, 19-year-old Jose met 22-year-old Marie-Louise Anderson.

The young woman had light hair, a wide smile, and insisted that everyone call her Kitty, a nickname she'd had since she was a child.

The couple fell for each other fast.

They met during the spring semester, and by July of the same year, they were married.

During the next few years, Jose and Kitty struggled to make ends meet.

Still, Kitty later spoke of these lean days fondly, calling them the happiest times of her marriage.

Kitty got a job as a schoolteacher in the Bronx, and Jose washed dishes to pay his way through school.

Often, all they had to eat for the entire week was a single salted ham, and they used their oven to heat the tiny apartment.

Eventually, their patience was rewarded.

In 1967, 23-year-old Jose graduated and was hired at one of the big eight accounting firms, Cooper's and Librand.

His starting salary was $25,000, the equivalent of over $230,000 today.

With their newfound economic security, the couple bought a house and started their family.

They had two sons, Joseph Lyle Menendez, born in 1968, and Eric Galen Menendez, born three years later.

Jose's mother described Lyle and Eric as two earthquakes.

They were wild troublemakers, likely because, according to their grandmother, Marta, Jose didn't believe in disciplining his sons.

Jose allowed the boys to get away with everything.

Even when they rampaged through Marta's home and broke her things, Jose never tried to stop them.

Part of the problem was that Jose was never home.

He spent nearly all of his time at work, far more than his co-workers.

He was willing to go to any lengths to get ahead.

Although his bosses loved his boldness and determination, his co-workers described Jose's work style as brutal.

One even said that he was alarmingly lacking in compassion and respect for his colleagues and subordinates.

His brother-in-law, Carlos Beralt, said, Jose had this remarkable ability to make people feel very,

very

small.

Jose was laser-focused on winning back the life he felt he deserved, and he didn't care what it took to get it.

In 1977, Jose and Kitty, along with nine-year-old Lyle and six-year-old Eric, moved to a posh neighborhood in Princeton, New Jersey.

As his work became more demanding, Jose started bringing his intense attitude home with him.

Now that his boys were approaching adolescence, Jose's parenting style went from lax to overbearing.

He was determined that his sons would become professional athletes, just like his parents, so he held them to an unattainable standard of excellence.

He reportedly didn't allow them to have close friends because he believed it would distract them.

Instead of reading them fairy tales, he forced them to memorize and recite quotes from books about self-improvement and business success.

The brothers have said that if either of them ever cried, complained, or disobeyed, Jose would threaten and even hit them.

Jose also became obsessed with how he and his family were perceived by others.

Although Kitty dreamed of working in broadcast media, Jose forced her to stay home.

He believed if she worked, it would undermine his position as the family's breadwinner.

To secure his dominance, the brothers claimed he frequently, verbally, and physically abused Kitty in front of them.

Reportedly, he even allowed, if not encouraged, the boys to disrespect their mother as well.

Kitty was left feeling powerless and alienated from the man she once loved.

As Jose continued to work his way up the corporate ladder, he transformed into a tyrant, consumed by his ambition.

In 1980, Jose began another new job, this time as the vice president of finance at RCA Records.

The position came with another salary bump.

He was pulling down nearly $1.8 million in today's money.

By the time Lyle and Eric entered their teenage years, lavish spending was the norm.

Jose, increasingly ostentatious, sent his sons to school every day in a limousine, and Kitty started buying new clothes rather than doing laundry.

Although many of Lyle and Eric's classmates thought the brothers were living a dream life, their father's incredible wealth was accompanied by impossible expectations.

He'd decided his boys would be tennis stars.

He forced them to get up early every morning to practice on a court he had built on their property.

He hired an expensive coach for private lessons and even demanded Lyle and Eric practice when they were sick or injured.

Lyle ran across the court, trying to ignore the pain shooting through his leg.

He gritted his teeth and tried to ignore it, but nothing distracted him from his sprained ankle.

He could see his father watching from the sidelines with narrowed eyes.

Lyle knew he didn't care about his ankle.

He had to play perfectly all the time, fight through the pain, mind over matter.

But it was impossible today.

He kept missing balls, and soon his opponent took the lead.

His father's stern voice rang out from the sidelines, calling Lyle a baby and telling him to suck it up.

Lyle flushed with rage and embarrassment.

His father never cut him a break.

He was a good tennis player, a great one even, but that didn't matter.

Lyle yelled back at his dad, Would you just shut up?

Jose hurled a tennis ball at Lyle in retaliation.

Later, back in the limousine, Jose allegedly punched him in the face.

He threatened to kill Lyle if he ever dared to yell at him again.

Lyle wiped the blood from his nose, seething with rage.

rage.

Whenever they played poorly, Jose berated and threatened his sons.

When they played well, he said nothing.

There was no way for Lyle and Eric to win their father's approval.

Meanwhile, Kitty also felt abandoned by her husband, who never had a moment to spare for herself.

In Princeton, she worked on creating an identity separate from Jose and let professional ambitions die.

She made friends and did charity work.

Over time, she adjusted to the upscale New Jersey neighborhood.

But it wasn't long before Jose was chasing another job, this time at Carolco Pictures, an entertainment company based in Los Angeles.

He jumped at the chance to run their home video division and was soon hired for a job across the country.

There was no discussion or negotiation.

When Jose wanted something, his wife and children were expected to comply.

But he had no idea how his family would react once they were isolated from the only place that had ever felt like home.

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In 1986, Jose Menendez moved his wife, Kitty, and his two teenage sons, Lyle and Eric, to a mansion in Calabasas, California.

With a high-powered executive job, a family, and an ever-growing fortune, it seemed like Jose, a Cuban immigrant, was living the American dream.

He worked diligently to project a perfect life, but it was a thin and shaky facade.

Beneath the veil of their wealth, the Menendez family was falling apart.

Neither Kitty nor the boys were happy about the move.

Jose had purchased the 8,000-square-foot estate not only to show show off his riches, but also to make Kitty feel better about being torn away from Princeton.

And to appease his sons, he had a tennis court built so they could continue training to be stars.

He thought he could buy his family's forgiveness, or at least use his money to shut them up.

But there were things even Jose's wealth couldn't get him.

His wife drank heavily and took prescription pills to cope with the move.

His sons resented him for taking them away from their friends in Princeton.

Although there had always been tension in the Menendez household, things were soon worse than ever.

Over the course of the family's first year in California, Jose began having affairs as well as regularly visiting sex workers during business trips.

He hardly made an attempt to hide his behavior from his wife.

Kitty loved the man Jose used to be, but hated who he had become.

Even so, after over 20 years of marriage, the thought of a divorce terrified her.

She didn't know anyone in California.

Her sense of self had been lost entirely.

She began seeing a psychotherapist who feared that she was suicidal.

In therapy sessions from October 1986 to February 1987, Kitty's doctor concluded that she was depressed, socially withdrawn, and dependent on prescription drugs and and alcohol.

Meanwhile, Eric was starting his sophomore year of high school, and Lyle had just graduated.

Both of the boys were desperate to gain their parents' affection and approval, but they viewed their sons as trophies, not people,

proof of their success.

Anytime their parents were together, they were short and snappish with each other, often exploding into loud arguments and even physical violence.

When Jose spoke to his sons, it was always to critique them.

Kitty hardly spoke at all.

She once admitted to her sister-in-law that she believed Lyle and Eric had ruined her marriage, and she wished they'd never been born.

In an attempt to finally make his parents proud, Lyle set his sights on getting into an Ivy League university.

He applied to Princeton in 1986, but was rejected due to his average academic record.

Jose was frustrated with what he called called Lyle's mediocrity.

So he took matters into his own hands.

He allegedly sent Princeton a $50,000 donation, and wouldn't you know it, Lyle was accepted the following year.

While his brother moved back to New Jersey, 16-year-old Eric attended the prestigious Calabasas High School.

He joined the varsity tennis team where he met Craig Signorelli, a boy who would become his closest friend in California.

Although both young men came from similarly privileged backgrounds, Craig would later describe Eric as particularly ostentatious.

Jose still sent his son to school each day in a limousine, and Eric made no effort to seem down-to-earth.

Even so, with Lyle away in New Jersey, Craig became like another brother to Eric.

The two saw each other practically every day at tennis practice and hung out together on the weekends.

Over time, they discovered they both had similar aspirations.

Living so close to Los Angeles, they couldn't help but dream of striking it big in the entertainment industry.

Eric was a dreamer who was constantly coming up with new ideas for plots and characters, while Craig was more practical.

They complemented each other perfectly, and together they started writing screenplays.

Eric attempted to escape the chaos of his family life through his writing, but it proved impossible as his father grew more frustrated with his brother.

During Lyle's first semester at Princeton, he received so many parking and speeding tickets that his driver's license was suspended twice.

Jose paid for his son to hire a limousine since he could no longer legally drive himself to class.

According to classmates, Lyle just wasn't cut out for Ivy League.

His work ethic was practically non-existent.

In his first semester, he was accused of of plagiarism.

The university's disciplinary committee ruled that Lyle could either voluntarily leave the school for a year

or be formally expelled.

Jose was mortified.

He allowed Lyle to move back to Calabasas on the condition that his son would spend his year off from school working at Live Entertainment, a subsidiary of Carol Co Pictures.

Lyle's job was to find discrepancies in expense reports.

It was a professional opportunity that many people would have considered themselves lucky to have.

But not Lyle.

He knew everyone in the office had judged him before he even walked inside.

Being the son of Jose Menendez had its perks, but a job at his father's company didn't feel like one of them.

He had no intention of spending hours poring over expense reports.

He didn't care about his co-workers, so he didn't bother to learn anyone's names or or exchange even the simplest pleasantries.

Lyle figured, since his father was the boss, it would be nearly impossible to lose the job.

Lyle's supervisors and co-workers were afraid to openly critique him because he was their boss's son.

But in private, they described him as nasty and self-satisfied.

In less than a month, they were fed up, and even nepotism couldn't keep Lyle employed.

Jose was disgusted with with his son, who squandered every opportunity he was given.

With Lyle back at home, now unemployed, tensions in the Menendez mansion were at an all-time high.

The triple stresses of her son's repeated failures, her husband's infidelity, and her social isolation were too much for Kitty to handle.

In 1987, she was admitted to California's Westlake Community Hospital with acute Xanax and alcohol ingestion.

Luckily, Kitty lived through the overdose, but her doctor was concerned about her returning home.

He diagnosed her with chronic depression and anxiety, but also said that she was inordinately more distressed than many people with these diagnoses.

According to him, she apparently had some kind of marital problem, but was unable to extricate herself from it.

Afterward, Kitty's behavior continued to escalate.

One afternoon, the sons claimed that she threatened to poison her husband, her children, and herself.

Instead of encouraging Kitty to seek more therapy, Jose just ignored her threats.

He simply refused to eat the meals Kitty made and opted to take his sons out to expensive restaurants instead.

Kitty lashed out at everyone in the house, calling Lyle a major problem in her life and Eric a disappointment.

Both boys were frightened of what she might do to them, but even more frightened of what she might do to herself.

Lyle and Eric oscillated between wanting to escape their parents' tyranny and craving their approval.

They were both outwardly cocky, but inwardly insecure.

These feelings are typical of children in wealthy families.

In her article entitled, The Culture of Affluence, Psychological Costs of Material Material Wealth, Dr.

Sunia S.

Luther researched how extreme wealth affects children's psychological development.

According to Dr.

Luther, teenagers of high socioeconomic status reported significantly higher levels of anxiety and greater depression than their middle and lower class counterparts.

She theorizes that this is due to unrelenting pressures to excel and isolation both literally and emotionally from parents.

Furthermore, she found that while there were comparable levels of delinquency among teenagers from all socioeconomic backgrounds, some extremely affluent youth displayed a marked willingness to steal from parents and peers.

This presumably stemmed from a disregard for possible consequences because they were confident their wealthy parents could get them out of trouble.

In 1988, Lyle and Eric, along with Craig and some other friends, followed a similar pattern.

The group started venturing out at night to burglarize the many extravagant homes in Calabasas.

Eric and Lyle didn't need money, of course.

They started thieving just for kicks.

The brothers were caught that summer after stealing over $100,000 worth of jewels in the nearby neighborhood of Hidden Hills.

When questioned, Eric immediately confessed.

Jose was horrified by what his sons had done.

He was furious, but even worse, he was embarrassed.

Appearances meant everything to him, and his children had nearly tarnished his reputation.

To keep the victims from pressing charges, Jose forced the boys to return the items they had stolen and wrote checks to replace the missing cash.

Although he was able to stop the victims from pressing charges, Lyle and Eric were still required to start attending counseling sessions, presumably to try to uncover the underlying causes of their criminal behavior.

Jose felt like he could hardly show his face in town anymore.

Disgraced, he insisted the family move once again, this time to an even larger, Spanish-style mansion in Beverly Hills.

Surprisingly, Kitty's depression lessened at the prospect of the move.

The mansion she and Jose purchased was once rented by Elton John.

To Kitty, it felt like the family had finally made it.

Jose had to be satisfied with this.

How could they climb any higher?

Maybe, just maybe, she thought, the move would be exactly what the family needed.

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Then you zoom in on photo number 87 and whisper, oh no.

Then you text a friend, the one who always enables you.

You say to yourself, this is the last one, knowing it is not.

You don't need this car.

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Bring a trailer.

It's never just a car.

After a lifetime of climbing the corporate ladder, Jose Menendez moved his family to an enormous mansion in Beverly Hills.

It seemed Jose had reached the peak of success.

But he hadn't always played fair.

He was a vicious businessman, an unfaithful husband, and a cruel father to Lyle and Eric.

At first, Kitty was excited about the move.

Her boys had gotten in trouble for stealing in Calabasas, but they were seeing a counselor now.

She and Jose had been at each other's throats for years.

But the mansion on North Elm Drive could be the perfect place to start over on a clean slate.

In In Beverly Hills, maybe her husband would finally be satisfied.

Meanwhile, Eric started his senior year at Beverly Hills High School.

He joined the tennis team, made average grades, and kept up with his friends from Calabasas.

He flourished in drama class and even began to consider a career as an actor.

But Jose quickly crushed this dream, insisting that Eric was meant to be a tennis star and a business tycoon.

He would settle for nothing less.

Following his year of suspension for plagiarism, Lyle returned to Princeton.

Jose bought his son a two-bedroom condo to live in while he finished school.

But, unsurprisingly, he focused more on girls than on his studies.

To top it off, Jose's affairs continued, which sent Kitty into an even deeper depression.

She was nearing 50 and started blaming herself for her husband's infidelity.

She felt inferior to many of the young women around her, especially at Jose's work functions in Hollywood.

If she could just look younger, she thought, her husband would stop cheating on her.

She got a facelift and started dieting obsessively.

For a while, she lived on little more than coffee and cigarettes.

But still, her husband wasn't faithful.

As the tension in the house continued to rise, Eric looked desperately for an escape.

To get out of the house on the weekends, he often visited his friend Craig Signorelli in Calabasas.

The boys were working on another screenplay together, this one titled Friends.

It followed a young man named Hamilton Cromwell, who stumbles upon his parents' will and discovers he's in line to inherit their $157 million fortune.

Hamilton smiles sadistically and, in the following scene, murders his parents and three other people before finally being arrested.

Eric was proud of the script.

If he couldn't be an actor, he could be a writer.

He hoped to get a film deal and finally impress his father.

However, Jose never even read the script that his son had agonized over.

When Kitty read it, she laughed out loud.

His parents considered the screenplay inconsequential, even though its protagonist delivered the following lines about his own father.

Sometimes he would tell me that I was not worthy to be his son.

When he did that, it would make me strive harder just so I could hear the words, I love you, son.

And I never heard those words.

The possibility that Hamilton Cromwell's character was inspired by Eric's own feelings was apparently lost on his father, but not on Craig.

He feared Eric was using the screenplay to live out a fantasy that he might one day bring to fruition.

Although she didn't know it at the time, Kitty was deeply disturbed by the kind of adults both of her sons had grown up to be.

During the summer of 1989, Kitty reportedly told her psychiatrist she was harboring sick and embarrassing secrets about her family.

She was worried her sons might be suffering from antisocial personality disorder, commonly referred to as sociopathy.

What Kitty couldn't accept was that if anyone in the family fit that description, it was Jose.

According to the Mayo Clinic, people suffering from antisocial personality disorders tend to manipulate and treat others harshly, much like Jose.

And he passed this selfish, hyper-competitive behavior on to his boys, not not only through his actions, but through his very DNA.

More research from the Mayo Clinic indicates that the exact cause of antisocial personality disorder isn't known, but genes may make you vulnerable to developing antisocial personality disorder, and life situations, especially neglect and abuse, may trigger its development.

In other words, there is a considerable genetic element to antisocial personality disorder.

It's possible that Lyle and Eric inherited at least some of their father's capacity for cruelty and deception.

If they hadn't inherited their father's coldness, he certainly tried to teach it to them.

They learned to hide how they felt and to manipulate the feelings of others from a young age.

In August of 1989, however, they came to a day of reckoning.

On the 15th, Lyle and Eric, now 21 and 18, claimed to have revealed secrets they'd been hiding from each other for years.

It's important to note the following is based on interviews and statements from Lyle and Eric, the only witnesses to what transpired.

It's possible they distorted or fabricated events.

However, it remains the only record of what possibly occurred in the family's Beverly Hills home.

According to them, on August 15th, Lyle and Kitty had a huge fight after he lost a tennis tennis tournament in Michigan.

The argument got so heated that Kitty allegedly started throwing punches at her son, eventually grabbing a handful of his hair and tearing the $1,500 toupee he wore off his scalp.

Eric was shocked, not at his mother's aggressive outburst, but because he'd never known his brother wore a hairpiece.

Lyle ran to the family's guest house to have some privacy and try to reattach his toupee.

When he came out of the bathroom with the hairpiece shoddily stuck on, he found Eric waiting for him, crying.

The revelation about Lyle's hair was the final straw for Eric.

He was sickened by the secrets they hid from each other.

To him, they hardly seemed like a family at all.

According to Lyle, Eric then revealed a secret of his own.

He confided to his brother that their father had been molesting him since he was just six years old.

Lyle was horrified.

He didn't doubt his brother's confession for a moment.

Their father's cruelty knew no bounds.

He felt guilty that while he'd been away partying at Princeton, his brother had been living a nightmare.

Lyle begged Eric to come stay with him in Princeton, but Eric was supposed to start classes at UCLA in less than a month.

Jose and Kitty had already paid his tuition, and more importantly, it would look terrible if Eric didn't start college straight out of high school.

Lyle was sick to his stomach.

He wanted to kill his father, if only to end the anguish he inflicted on others.

As his brother sobbed uncontrollably, Lyle feared that if the abuse didn't end, Eric might become suicidal.

Jose would drive him crazy, just like he'd done to their mother.

Lyle came up with a plan.

He'd confront his father about the abuse and promise to stay quiet as long as Jose allowed Eric to move to Princeton.

According to interviews with the Menendez brothers, Lyle attempted to confront his father two days later on August 17th.

Jose refused to engage with his son and was adamant that Eric would start school at UCLA in the fall.

Lyle claimed that his father said, The things that happened between him and Eric were his business.

The best thing for Lyle to to do was forget they ever had this conversation.

Lyle threatened his father, saying he would tell the police if the abuse didn't end.

Jose waved his son away.

No matter what they did, Lyle and Eric both believed that the police couldn't protect them from their powerful father.

When Lyle asked his mother if she knew about the abuse, she allegedly responded, I've always known.

What do you think?

I'm stupid?

They feared Jose would resort to violence to keep them quiet about the alleged sexual abuse.

He'd threatened to kill his sons many times throughout their lives, but this time, they really thought he might do it.

To protect themselves, they purchased two 12-gauge Mossberg shotguns and buckshot ammunition.

On the night of August 19th, Eric said his father pounded on his bedroom door and told him to open up.

He refused, cradling the shotgun to his chest.

Jose reminded Eric he could only hide for so long.

Lyle and Eric said they stayed apart the next morning for fear their parents would try to kill them if they were together.

That night around 9.30, they tried to leave the house, but Jose blocked them at the door.

He demanded they go upstairs to their rooms.

Lyle exploded, screaming at Jose, you're not going to touch Eric anymore.

Jose grabbed Kitty's arm, dragged her into the family room with him, and slammed the door shut.

That's when Lyle took his younger brother by the hand, locked eyes with him, and said, it's happening now.

He turned and sprinted upstairs to grab his gun.

Thanks for listening to Serial Killers, a Spotify podcast.

We're here with a new episode every Monday.

Be sure to check us out on Instagram at Serial Killers Podcast, and we'd love to hear from you.

So if you're listening on the Spotify app, swipe up and give us your thoughts.

For more information on this case, amongst the many sources we used, we found the book The Menendez Murders, The Shocking Untold Story of the Menendez Family and the Killings That Stunned the Nation by Robert Rand, extremely helpful to our research.

The audiobook edition is available for Spotify Premium subscribers in Spotify's audiobook catalog.

Stay safe out there.

This episode was written by Karis Allen with writing assistance by Abigail Cannon and sound designed by Alex Button.

Our head of programming is Julian Boirot.

Our head of production is Nick Johnson.

And Spencer Howard is our post-production supervisor.

I'm your host, Vanessa Richardson.