Lyle Menendez

The backstory

The killings

On the night of Aug. 20, 1989, Lyle Menendez, then 21, and his brother Erik, then 18, shot and killed their parents, José and Kitty Menendez, in the den of the family’s home in Beverly Hills, according to the Ninth Circuit’s statement of facts.¹² The court wrote that the brothers “burst through the doors of the den and fired thirteen to fifteen shotgun blasts at their parents.”¹ Four shots struck José and nine struck Kitty, and the last was fired at close range to Kitty’s left cheek while she was still alive, the court wrote.¹ José also had wounds to his legs inflicted after his death, according to the opinion.¹ Lyle was a student at Princeton University; Erik was preparing to start at UCLA.²

Two days earlier, on Aug. 18, the brothers had tried to buy guns in Los Angeles and San Diego, and in San Diego “they bought two shotguns using false identification and providing non-existent addresses,” the court wrote.¹ They later bought buckshot after being told birdshot would be “useless” for stopping a person.¹

The cover-up

After the shooting, the brothers collected the shotgun shells, discarded movie tickets for Batman that they had bought as an alibi, and disposed of the shells and their bloody clothing, according to the Ninth Circuit.¹ Lyle then called a friend with a false story about having gotten lost on the way to meet him, the court wrote.¹ At about 11:47 p.m., the brothers called 911 and said they had just come home, NBC Los Angeles reported; it was Lyle who made the call, according to the Associated Press.²³¹⁷

The brothers first suggested the killings were connected to their father’s business; Lyle hired a security firm and told it that an organized-crime group was responsible, according to the district attorney’s 2024 motion.¹⁷² Both told police they had been elsewhere at the time of the killings.² About two months later, Erik told his psychologist, Jerome Oziel, that they had killed their parents, according to the Associated Press.¹⁷ Recordings of the brothers’ sessions with Oziel were litigated for years, and the Ninth Circuit later rejected the brothers’ challenge to the admission of one taped session at trial.²¹

Beverly Hills police announced Lyle’s arrest on March 8, 1990; Erik, who had been abroad, surrendered a few days later.²³²⁴ The indictment charged murder with special circumstances of lying in wait and multiple murder, and an amended indictment added a count of conspiracy to murder both parents, according to the district attorney’s motion.² On Jan. 12, 1993, prosecutors announced they would seek the death penalty.²

The first trial

The brothers went on trial together in July 1993, before Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Stanley M. Weisberg, with a separate jury for each.²¹²⁶ The trial was televised.²⁶ Prosecutors argued the killings were for financial gain; the defense did not dispute that the brothers had killed their parents, but argued that they acted in self-defense after years of abuse by their father.²¹

Lyle testified that their father had sexually abused both brothers when they were young, and described their mother’s indifference when they confronted her, according to Court TV.²⁶ He testified that when they told their father, days before the killings, that they would tell people about the abuse, José replied, “We all make choices in life, son. Erik made his, you’ve made yours.”²⁶ Lyle testified that the abuse was mostly by their father but at times also by their mother, NBC News reported.²⁴

Both juries deadlocked between murder and manslaughter. Erik’s jury was declared deadlocked on Jan. 13, 1994, after 19 days of deliberation, and Lyle’s on Jan. 28, 1994, after 25 days, the Los Angeles Times reported.²⁷

The retrial

The retrial began in October 1995, this time before a single jury for both brothers and without television cameras.²²⁶ Much of the defense’s abuse evidence was excluded, the Associated Press reported.²¹ Judge Weisberg ruled that jurors could not reduce murder to manslaughter on the basis of abuse-driven fear, according to the Los Angeles Times, and the Ninth Circuit later upheld his refusal to instruct the jury on imperfect self-defense.²⁷¹

Erik testified that his father had abused him for years and that the brothers feared their parents would kill them, the Ninth Circuit wrote; describing the moment he entered the den, he said, “I just started firing. I didn’t stop and look around.”¹ He testified that Lyle had confronted their father days before the killings, and that José told Lyle to “go to Princeton, forget the conversation ever happened.”¹ Erik also testified that he avoided a fishing trip on Aug. 19 that he feared was a plan to kill the brothers at sea, according to the district attorney’s motion.² Prosecutors kept more than 30 friends, teachers and coaches off the stand, attacked the abuse allegations directly, and called psychiatrist Park Dietz, who testified that Erik was rational when he fired, the Times reported.²⁷ Lyle did not testify at the retrial.²⁷ The district attorney’s 2024 motion alleges that he had asked two friends to give false testimony, one about a handgun and one about abuse.²

Deliberations began March 1, 1996, after 78 days of testimony, and restarted on March 14 when two jurors were replaced for illness, according to the Times.²⁷ On March 20, 1996, the jury convicted both brothers of two counts of first-degree murder and of conspiracy to commit murder, with special-circumstance findings including lying in wait.²⁷²³¹⁷

The sentence and appeals

In April 1996 the penalty jury returned verdicts of life without parole rather than death, and on July 2, 1996, the court imposed consecutive terms of life without parole for the two murders and stayed the sentence on the conspiracy count.² The brothers were sent to different prisons.²³

A California appeals court upheld the convictions in 1998, and the California Supreme Court followed about three months later, the Associated Press reported.²¹ State and federal habeas petitions were denied.²¹ On Sept. 7, 2005, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit affirmed the denial of federal habeas relief, rejecting five claims, among them the admission of the taped therapy session, the refusal to instruct on imperfect self-defense, the exclusion of defense testimony and the prosecutor’s comments on the lack of abuse evidence: “we reject all five contentions; and we affirm.”¹

The new-trial petition

On May 3, 2023, the brothers’ lawyers filed a habeas corpus petition citing two new pieces of evidence: a letter Erik is said to have written to a cousin, Andy Cano, in late 1988 or early 1989 describing abuse by his father, and allegations by Roy Rosselló, a former member of the boy band Menudo, that José Menendez sexually abused him as a teenager.²¹¹² Rosselló made his allegation publicly, in the 2023 Peacock docuseries Menendez + Menudo: Boys Betrayed, which included his sworn declaration.²³ It has not been tested in court. The lawyers argued that the evidence “directly supports the defense presented at trial.”¹²

On July 7, 2025, Judge William Ryan ordered prosecutors to show why relief should not be granted, the Associated Press reported, and in August District Attorney Nathan Hochman opposed the petition.¹⁹²³ On Sept. 15, 2025, Judge Ryan denied it.¹² He wrote that “neither piece of newly discover (sic) evidence is particularly strong,” that the letter “contradicts in part the testimony of Erik and Cano,” and that “neither piece of evidence adds to the allegations of abuse that the jury already considered,” ABC News reported.¹³ The evidence was “not so compelling that it would have produced a reasonable doubt in the mind of at least one juror,” he wrote, according to CBS Los Angeles.¹⁴ He found Rosselló’s claims not relevant to the brothers’ state of mind at the time of the killings, ABC News reported.¹³

Resentencing

On Oct. 24, 2024, then-District Attorney George Gascón announced that his office would ask the court to resentence the brothers, and its motion asked for 50 years to life, two consecutive terms of 25 years to life.³² The motion argued that the brothers’ youth at the time of the crimes was a significant mitigating factor and noted that the new sentence would make them eligible for youthful-offender parole hearings.² Gov. Gavin Newsom said in November 2024 that he would not decide on the brothers’ clemency request until the newly elected district attorney had reviewed the case.²¹

Gascón’s successor, Nathan Hochman, took office in December 2024 and on March 10, 2025, said he would not support resentencing because the brothers had not taken “complete responsibility” for their lies.²¹²² In February 2025, Newsom ordered the parole board to conduct a risk assessment of the brothers.²³ On April 11, Judge Michael Jesic denied Hochman’s request to withdraw his predecessor’s motion; the brothers’ bid to remove the district attorney’s office from the case failed in May.⁴²¹

On May 13, 2025, Judge Jesic resentenced both brothers to 50 years to life.⁶ “I’m not saying they should be released, it’s not for me to decide,” he said, adding, “I do believe they’ve done enough in the past 35 years, that they should get that chance.”²⁰ Because they were under 26 at the time of the crimes, they became immediately eligible for parole under California’s youthful-offender law.²⁰²¹

The parole hearing

Lyle appeared by video from the Richard J. Donovan Correctional Facility on Aug. 22, 2025, before a two-commissioner panel, a day after a separate panel denied his brother parole.⁷¹⁶ The hearing lasted about 11 hours, CNN reported.¹⁸ The panel denied him parole for three years.¹⁶⁷

Commissioner Julie Garland said the panel found his remorse genuine and that he had been a “model inmate in many ways,” but that he showed “anti-social personality traits like deception, minimization and rule-breaking that lie beneath that positive surface,” the Associated Press reported.¹⁶ The panel focused on his use of contraband cellphones, as recently as March 2025.¹⁶ Lyle said he saw the phones as a privacy measure because staff were monitoring his calls with family, and that he “would never call myself a model incarcerated person.”¹⁶¹⁵ Garland called his final shot at his mother “callous” and cited his efforts to cover up the crime, AP reported.¹⁵ Deputy District Attorney Ethan Milius told the panel that Lyle “struggles with honesty,” citing past lies, CNN reported.¹⁸ The risk assessment Newsom had ordered was never made public; Hochman said in May 2025 that both brothers were rated “moderate risk.”¹⁵

Garland told him, “Don’t ever not have hope.”¹⁶

Why the jury convicted

The 1996 jury, hearing both brothers’ cases together, rejected the defense theory and found both guilty of first-degree murder with special circumstances.²⁷¹⁷ Judge Ryan wrote in 2025 that the jury had found the brothers planned and carried out the killings despite the abuse allegations it heard, ABC News reported.¹³ No court has made findings on the abuse allegations themselves.

Personal backstory

Early life

Joseph Lyle Menendez was born on Jan. 10, 1968, the elder of José and Mary Louise “Kitty” Menendez’s two sons; Erik was born in November 1970.²⁴ José had been sent from Cuba to live with a relative in the United States as a teenager, and he rose to become chief operating officer of RCA-Ariola and later worked at Carolco Pictures, NBC News reported.²⁴ Kitty, born in Illinois, met José at Southern Illinois University; they married in 1963.²⁴ The family lived near Princeton, New Jersey, where both boys attended Princeton Day School and played tennis and soccer, and moved to California in 1986.²⁴ José bought the Beverly Hills house in October 1988.²⁴

The abuse allegations

Lyle testified at the first trial that his father sexually abused him and Erik when they were young.²⁶²⁴ At his 2025 parole hearing he said his father sexually abused him from ages 6 to 8, and that his mother abused him as well, CNN and the Associated Press reported.¹⁸¹⁶ He told a probation officer that at 13 he confronted his father about the abuse of Erik, according to the district attorney’s 2024 motion, which also cites an aunt and a cousin who described Erik’s abuse and the family’s secrecy.² No court has found the allegations proven. The first juries deadlocked between murder and manslaughter, and the 1996 jury convicted both brothers of first-degree murder.²⁷ District Attorney Hochman has said the self-defense claim does not match the evidence of planning and of an attempt to make the killings look like a gang hit.²²

Princeton

Lyle enrolled at Princeton University and was a student there at the time of the killings.² At his parole hearing, a prosecutor cited a plagiarism accusation at Princeton among his past lies, CNN reported.¹⁸

No mental-health diagnosis of Lyle found by a court appears in the sources reviewed. The parole commissioners’ remarks about “anti-social personality traits” were their assessment at the hearing, not a diagnosis.¹⁶

In custody

After sentencing the brothers were held in separate prisons.²³ Lyle was moved in February 2018 from Mule Creek State Prison to R.J. Donovan Correctional Facility in San Diego after his security classification was lowered, and on April 4, 2018, Erik was moved into his housing unit, one in which prisoners agree to take part in education and rehabilitation programs, the Associated Press reported.²⁵

According to the district attorney’s 2024 motion, Lyle earned a bachelor’s degree from the University of California, Irvine, through a prison program, served for more than ten years as an elected prisoner representative, developed a mural project called GreenSpace that has raised more than $250,000, and founded a program for prisoners who experienced childhood trauma.² The motion listed five rule-violation reports over more than 30 years, the latest a cellphone possession in March 2024, and said the corrections department classified him as low risk to reoffend.² He has had no fights in prison, according to court documents cited by the Associated Press.¹⁶ He admitted at his parole hearing that he used his position on the prison’s Men’s Advisory Council to get more authorized phone time, CNN reported.¹⁸

At his resentencing he said the impact of his actions on his family was “unfathomable.”²⁰ At his parole hearing he said, “My life has been defined by extreme violence. I wanted to be defined by something else,” and “I am so sorry to everyone, and I will be forever sorry,” CNN reported.¹⁸ He is 58.²⁴

Family

Because José and Kitty Menendez were the victims, their relatives are also the defendants’ relatives, and nearly all of them support the brothers’ release.¹⁷⁸ At Lyle’s parole hearing a cousin asked the commissioners to “make this torture end,” and an aunt, through her daughter, said she hoped the brothers would be released “before I die,” CNN reported.¹⁸ Kitty Menendez’s brother, the only relative known to oppose release, died in March 2025.¹⁷¹⁸ After the parole board advanced the hearings in 2026, the family said it was “incredibly proud of the men they have become.”¹⁰