The Menendez Brothers: The Parole Years

This transcript is the episode script as written and fact-checked, timed to the recording. Timestamps are approximate within a sentence.

0:05 What's up guys, welcome back to CrimeTimeSnacks. In September 2026, the California parole board did something it did not have to do. It gave Lyle and Erik Menendez an early parole suitability hearing, tentatively scheduled for March 2027. One year earlier, that same board had turned both brothers down and told them to come back in August 2028. So next year, two men who were sentenced to die in prison are going to sit in front of a parole panel for the second time. Lyle is fifty-eight.

0:31 Erik is fifty-five. They have been locked up since March of 1990. You've probably heard the headline version of this case. The Beverly Hills mansion, the shotguns, the spending spree, the trial on television. I covered the murders and the trials in an earlier episode, so I am only going to walk through that part once, and quickly. This episode is about everything that came after the verdict. Thirty years of appeals that went nowhere, a letter found in a dresser, a district attorney who wanted them resentenced and another one who fought it, a judge who cut their sentences, a parole board that said no, and now a date on the calendar.

1:03 Let's unpack it. On August 20, 1989, Lyle and Erik Menendez killed their parents, Jose and Kitty, inside the family's five-million-dollar home in Beverly Hills. Lyle was twenty-one. Erik was eighteen. Hold on to those two ages, because thirty-six years later they are the reason a parole hearing is possible at all. Two days before the killings, the brothers bought Mossberg shotguns at a Big 5 Sporting Goods store in San Diego, and Erik used a driver's license that had been stolen from a friend of Lyle's.

1:30 After the murders they told police that unknown intruders were responsible, and Lyle suggested it might be business-related, a mob killing. Police looked into that at first. What turned detectives around was money and a confession. The brothers spent approximately seven hundred thousand dollars in the months after the killings, and they hired a computer expert to delete their father's recently updated will. Then Erik confessed to his psychologist, Jerome Oziel. Oziel told his mistress, Judalon Smyth.

1:56 After the two of them broke up, Smyth went to the police. Lyle was arrested on March 8, 1990, outside the Beverly Hills mansion. Erik was in Israel for a tennis tournament, and he flew back to Los Angeles and turned himself in three days later. They were charged with two counts of first-degree murder with special circumstances for lying in wait, which made them eligible for the death penalty. On January 12, 1993, prosecutors announced that they would seek it. There were two trials, and the difference between them is the whole reason this case is still alive.

2:25 So let's take them one at a time. The first trial did not begin until July 1993, and a good part of the wait was a fight over the therapy tapes. In August 1990, Judge James Albracht ruled the tapes of the sessions with Oziel were admissible, because Oziel said Lyle had threatened him, which broke doctor-patient privilege. That ruling was appealed, and the proceedings stalled for two years. In August 1992 the Supreme Court of California ruled that most of the tapes could come in, with one exception: the tape on which Erik discussed the murders.

2:54 A grand jury indicted the brothers in December 1992. And here is a detail that gets lost. The special circumstance that the killings were committed for financial gain was deemed unsupported by the evidence, and it was excluded from the charges. The greed theory was argued at trial, but it was not what they were charged with. The first trial began in July 1993. Cameras were allowed in the courtroom, and it was broadcast on Court TV. The brothers had separate juries. Erik was represented by Leslie Abramson, and Lyle by Jill Lansing.

3:25 The defense was that the brothers killed their parents out of fear for their lives, after a lifetime of abuse, especially sexual abuse by Jose. Lyle testified that his father began abusing him when he was six and stopped when he was eight. Erik testified that it continued until shortly before the murders, and that two weeks before the killings he told Lyle about it for the first time. Both of them testified that Jose had threatened to kill them if they did not keep it secret. They were not the only ones who took the stand on this.

3:52 A cousin, Diane Vander Molen, testified that in the summer of 1976 Lyle confided in her that his father was sexually abusing him. She said she told Kitty, and Kitty sided with her husband and accused Lyle of lying. Under questioning she said she had never directly witnessed any abuse. Another cousin testified that Erik had told him about the abuse when they were children. That cousin's name was Andy Cano. Remember it. The prosecution's answer was that the abuse was fabricated.

4:17 They told the jurors that nobody mentioned abuse until a legal defense was being put together seven months after the murders. It was absent from the taped sessions with the psychologist. On those tapes, the brothers complained about a dictatorial father and a suicidal mother, and according to Oziel's account they killed out of hatred and a desire to be free of their father's domination. The defense went after the psychologist. A defense consultant, Ann Burgess, called Oziel manipulative and controlling, and argued that he directed many of the statements on those recordings.

4:46 And Judalon Smyth, the woman whose tip had led to the arrests, now testified for the defense, saying Oziel taped the sessions because he wanted to control the brothers. Prosecutors pointed out that she was the one who had gone to the police in the first place, and that she had changed sides after a tumultuous breakup. Prosecutor Pam Bozanich pointed to the shotguns bought in advance, and to a taped statement that the murders were planned beforehand. She played Lyle's 9-1-1 call for the jury to show how good an actor he was.

5:13 And before the trial, Lyle had offered to bribe an ex-girlfriend to say that Jose had made sexual advances toward her. She went to the police. Lyle admitted to the scheme on the stand. After a month of deliberations, in January 1994, both juries deadlocked. And they split by gender. The female jurors leaned toward voluntary manslaughter. The male jurors pushed for first-degree murder. District Attorney Gil Garcetti chose to retry the brothers rather than offer a plea to lesser charges.

5:40 The second trial looked very different. Judge Stanley Weisberg did not allow cameras this time. He said they would increase the risk that jurors would be exposed to commentary about the case outside the courtroom. It was also far less publicized. Erik testified for fifteen days about the abuse he alleged. Lyle did not testify at all. The judge limited some of the testimony about certain allegations, and he limited the defense to sixty-four witnesses. The cross-examination was blunt.

6:05 Prosecutor David Conn challenged Erik's claim that the abuse continued when he was eighteen, with a car and enough money to leave home. He asked why Erik had not simply joined the Army. Erik said he would not have been safe from his father even there, because his father was, in his words, the most powerful man I've ever met. Erik also admitted that there were no witnesses to the sexual abuse he described. The experts split the same way the juries had. A psychology professor, John Wilson, testified for the defense that Erik showed symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder that supported his account.

6:37 A psychiatrist for the prosecution, Park Elliot Dietz, countered that there was no way to know that, because the allegations themselves were unproven. He added that Erik had not shown learned helplessness. He had bought guns and practiced with them at a shooting range. Then came the ruling that mattered most. Weisberg determined there was insufficient evidence that the brothers were in imminent danger when they killed their parents. Under California law, that was the door to manslaughter, and it closed.

7:03 He allowed the defense to argue that they shot Jose in the heat of passion. He did not allow that argument for Kitty. The prosecution also went after credibility. Conn told the jury that Lyle had asked a friend to fabricate a story for the first trial, and police had found a seven-page letter, allegedly from Lyle, laying out how he wanted that friend to testify. There was a second letter, allegedly written to an ex-girlfriend, with instructions on how to testify. One line read: We will decide later around what date this incident occurred.

7:30 The defense disputed that the letter was authentic. Even the penalty phase produced a side fight. Leslie Abramson reportedly told a defense witness, William Vicary, to edit his own notes of his meetings with Erik to take out potentially incriminating information. The district attorney's office decided not to open a criminal investigation. Both brothers filed motions for a mistrial over it, claiming ineffective representation. They were convicted of first-degree murder with special circumstances, and of conspiracy to murder.

7:58 On July 2, 1996, Judge Weisberg sentenced them to life without the possibility of parole, the terms to run consecutively. So here is the argument their supporters have made for thirty years. One set of jurors heard the full abuse case and could not agree. The next jury heard less of it and convicted. And here is the argument on the other side. These are two defendants accused of coaching witnesses, and the judge who limited the abuse evidence still let them argue heat of passion, and the jury still said murder.

8:26 Both of those things are in the record. Keep both in mind for what comes next. The brothers did not accept the verdict. They appealed, and then they kept appealing, and the record of those appeals is a straight line of losses. On February 27, 1998, the California Court of Appeal upheld the murder convictions. On May 28, 1998, the Supreme Court of California declined to review the case, which let that decision stand. Both brothers then filed habeas corpus petitions with the state supreme court.

8:54 Those were denied in 1999. With nothing left to try in state court, they filed separate habeas petitions in federal district court. On March 4, 2003, a magistrate judge recommended denying them, and the district court adopted that recommendation. They appealed to the Ninth Circuit. On September 7, 2005, a three-judge panel denied both petitions. Every court that had looked at the case had reached the same answer. For a long time, that is exactly where it stood. Two men serving life without parole, with no legal road left in front of them.

9:25 So what does a life sentence actually look like, year after year? The record has some answers, and they are stranger and sadder than you might expect. On July 2, 1996, the same day he was sentenced to life without parole, Lyle married a woman named Anna Eriksson. The ceremony was done over the telephone, and his aunt Marta attended. They divorced on April 1, 2001, after Eriksson discovered he had been writing to another woman. In November 2003 he married Rebecca Sneed in a visiting area of Mule Creek State Prison.

9:54 They had known each other for around ten years. They separated in 2024. On June 12, 1999, Erik married Tammi Saccoman in the waiting room of Folsom State Prison. She described the day later. She said: Our wedding cake was a Twinkie. We improvised. It was a wonderful ceremony until I had to leave. That was a very lonely night. In 2005 she self-published a book about the marriage, and she said she and her daughter drove a hundred and fifty miles every weekend to visit him. That same year Erik talked to People magazine about his sentence.

10:23 He said: Tammi is what gets me through. I can't think about the sentence. When I do, I do it with a great sadness and a primal fear. Their family points to what the brothers built in those years. According to relatives, they helped establish a hospice program, launched a beautification project, and created something called Green Space. The family's description is that it was all meant to remind people serving life sentences that their lives still have meaning. Remember that, because when the parole board finally got to look at their prison records, it did not see model prisoners.

10:52 It saw something else. While the courts were saying no, the story never left television. In 1994 alone there was a CBS miniseries and a television film called Honor Thy Father and Mother. Court TV did an episode in 2000. Barbara Walters featured the brothers. In 2017 there was a Lifetime movie with Courtney Love, and a Law and Order True Crime season produced by Dick Wolf. That same year, Erik gave telephone interviews from prison for an A&E docuseries, and Lyle did one with Chris Cuomo for HLN.

11:19 For most of those years the case was a punchline. The notes I worked from have an entire section on parodies and dark comedy. The brothers were the rich kids who shot their parents and bought Rolexes. One detail tells you how deep into the culture this went. The brothers can be seen sitting courtside at a Knicks game in the background of a Mark Jackson basketball card. In December 2018, eBay began terminating auctions that mentioned them in the listing. Then the audience changed.

11:44 In 2021, an ABC 20/20 special called Inside the Menendez Movement documented something nobody had predicted. The brothers had become popular on TikTok. Young adults, inside and outside the United States, who had not been born when the trials aired, were watching the old testimony about abuse and hearing it very differently than audiences had in 1993. In 2022, a Discovery Plus documentary asked outright whether the brothers had been misjudged. And in September 2024, Netflix released a Ryan Murphy series about the case.

12:12 It was widely criticized for implying an incestuous relationship between the brothers. The journalist Robert Rand, who wrote a book on the case, called that fantasy, with no credible evidence behind it. Erik answered it himself, in a statement posted through his wife's account on September 20, 2024. He called the series a dishonest portrayal, and he wrote: Is the truth not enough? Let the truth stand as the truth. Five days later the family put out their own statement. They called the show a phobic, gross, anachronistic, serial episodic nightmare.

12:42 But here is the uncomfortable part. The series is widely credited with reigniting public interest in the case. Murphy himself said it was the best thing that had happened to the brothers in thirty years. And District Attorney George Gascón said that October that his office had received an influx of calls about Lyle and Erik Menendez. Legal experts who talked to Business Insider were careful about this. The series was not new evidence. They called it a catalyst. It did things in the real world, too.

13:08 The house in Beverly Hills where the murders happened saw an influx of tourists, some from outside the country. Police took calls about trespassing, including people trying to get onto the property to recreate old photographs of the brothers, and a covered barricade and fencing went up. One of the actors, Cooper Koch, who played Erik, met both brothers at the Richard J. Donovan Correctional Facility as part of a prison reform meeting led by Kim Kardashian. And in February 2025, Lyle told TMZ that he and Erik were grateful the series had shed light on child abuse.

13:37 So the brothers' own view of it moved, too. There was new evidence, though, or at least evidence that was being called new. It came in two pieces. The first was a man named Roy Rosselló. He had been a member of Menudo, the boy band, which was signed to RCA Records while Jose Menendez was an executive there. On April 18, 2023, Rosselló appeared on NBC's Today show and said that when he was fourteen years old, he was drugged and raped by Jose Menendez while visiting the family's home in New Jersey.

14:03 The next month, Peacock released a documentary series built around his account, called Menendez plus Menudo: Boys Betrayed. The second was a letter, and this is where that name comes back. It appears to have been written by Erik in 1988, the year before the murders, to his cousin Andy Cano, the same cousin who testified at the first trial. In it Erik talks about the abuse. Robert Rand said he found it in 2018, in a dresser in Cano's bedroom. In May 2023, attorneys for the brothers filed a habeas corpus petition in Los Angeles County Superior Court built on those two things.

14:36 The petition cited them as new evidence. On October 3, 2024, George Gascón held a press conference and announced that his office was actively reviewing the petition. Three weeks later, on October 24, he announced he was asking the court to resentence the brothers. If a judge went along with it, they would be eligible for parole. What he actually said is worth hearing in full, because both sides quote half of it. He said: I do believe that the brothers were subjected to a tremendous amount of dysfunction in the home, and molestation.

15:04 And he also said: I don't believe that manslaughter would have been the appropriate charge given the premeditation that was involved. So he was not saying they were innocent, and he was not saying it was self-defense. His recommendation rested on the length of time they had already served and on their behavior in prison. His phrase was that they had paid their debt to society. A resentencing hearing was set for December 11, 2024. It did not happen. At a hearing on November 25, it was pushed to the end of January.

15:31 Then the Los Angeles fires pushed it to March 20. Then it was pushed again, to April. And there was a second track. The brothers had also asked Governor Gavin Newsom for clemency, and in March 2025 he said on his own podcast that the parole board would hold risk-assessment hearings for each brother on June 13, to help him decide. In the middle of all that, Los Angeles elected a new district attorney. Nathan Hochman took office, and he reversed Gascón's recommendation. He also filed an opposition to the habeas petition.

15:59 Hochman did not soften it. He called the brothers' claims of self-defense self-serving lies. And he went straight at the letter. His argument was that the letter to Andy Cano was not credible, because it had not been used by either defense team at either trial. If a letter like that had existed in 1993, why did nobody put it in front of a jury? That is the same position the original prosecutors took. They told the juries the abuse allegations were fabricated, and that the brothers killed out of hatred and for the estate.

16:25 Thirty years later the office had come back to where it started. So by the spring of 2025, the question was in front of a judge with the county's top prosecutor arguing against it. It is worth noticing what that means. The resentencing did not happen because the district attorney wanted it. By the end, it happened in spite of him. In May 2025, a judge resentenced Lyle and Erik Menendez to fifty years to life. On paper that still sounds like forever. It is not, and the reason is those two ages I asked you to hold on to.

16:53 Lyle was twenty-one and Erik was eighteen. Under California law, because they were under twenty-six when they committed the murders, the new sentence made them immediately eligible for parole. Their family released a statement. They said: Erik and Lyle were once sentenced to life without the possibility of parole. We will always be profoundly grateful that they have been resentenced and that our family can now imagine a future in which they are once again part of our everyday lives.

17:18 Eligible is not the same as released, though. A judge can change a sentence. Only the parole board can open the door. The hearings came three months later, on consecutive days. On August 21, 2025, Erik went first. The California Board of Parole Hearings denied him, citing ongoing rule violations and concerns about public safety. Lyle was denied the following day, with the board referencing repeated cell phone infractions. Parole Board Commissioner Robert Barton cited prison violations, including the use of illegal cellphones and incidents of violence.

17:47 One report said Erik had been linked to a prison gang at one time. The family had been telling the public these were model prisoners. The board read their files and said their conduct in prison did not make them suitable. This is the part of the story that does not fit neatly on either side. If you believe the brothers, the hospice program and Green Space are the real record. If you believe the board, the cellphones and the violence are. Both sets of facts are in the same file, about the same two men.

18:12 The denial was for three years. That put their next chance in August 2028. There was one more door, and it closed the following month. In September 2025, a Los Angeles Superior Court judge ruled on the brothers' petition for a new trial, the one built on the Rosselló allegation and the Cano letter. Judge William Ryan denied it. He wrote: The evidence alleged here is not so compelling that it would have produced a reasonable doubt in the mind of at least one juror, or supportive of an imperfect self-defense instruction.

18:40 Read that sentence again, slowly. He is not saying the abuse did not happen. He is saying that even if a jury had seen this evidence, it would not have changed the verdict on premeditated murder. That is a narrower ruling than the headlines made it sound, and it is also a complete loss. The convictions stand, and no court has granted them a new trial. Which brings us back to where we started. In September 2026, weeks after the thirty-seventh anniversary of the murders, the parole board granted both brothers an early suitability hearing.

19:10 Instead of August 2028, it is tentatively scheduled for March 2027. How does that happen after a three-year denial? According to the Orange County Register, it comes from two provisions in a California law called Proposition 9. Those provisions allow an inmate's next hearing to be moved up if there is a change in circumstances, or new information indicating the person may be suitable for parole. The family's statement thanked the board for recognizing the brothers' efforts. And it gave a reason for the urgency that has nothing to do with law.

19:39 They wrote that time together is something none of them can take for granted, particularly as the elderly members of the family, including the brothers' aunts Joan, Terry and Marta, grow older and face serious health challenges. Not everyone is glad about it. A former Sacramento district attorney, Anne Marie Schubert, is leading a lawsuit against new Board of Parole Hearings guidelines, and she warns they will open a path to freedom for the state's worst violent criminals. The Menendez hearing landed right in the middle of that fight.

20:06 Both brothers are held at the Richard J. Donovan Correctional Facility in San Diego. So here is where the case stands, and here is what I think is worth watching next year. The parole board is not going to retry 1989. It is not going to decide whether Jose Menendez abused his sons. Gascón said he believed it, Hochman called it lies, and Judge Ryan ruled it would not have changed the verdict. None of that is the board's question. The board's question is narrower and harder. Are these two men, today, a danger to the public?

20:34 In 2025 the answer was about cellphones and rule violations. In 2027 the brothers have to show that something has changed since then, because that is the only reason the hearing got moved up in the first place. I am not going to tell you how that should come out. There are two dead people at the center of this, and there are two men who have spent more than three decades in prison, and the record gives you reasons to feel strongly in both directions. The next hearing is tentatively scheduled for March 2027, and I will be watching it.

21:03 The filings, the rulings and the family's statements are all public. Read the file. Form your own conclusion. That's it for this one. Thanks for hanging out with me. This has been CrimeTimeSnacks, and I'll catch you next time.