Lyle and Erik Menendez appeared via audio at a court hearing Monday as their two elderly aunts asked a judge to resentence the brothers for the 1989 shotgun murders of their parents, José and Kitty Menendez. Los Angeles County Judge Michael Jesic heard the testimony but said it was too early for him to take any action on the latest bid for freedom. He pushed a previously planned Dec. 11 hearing out to Jan. 30.
“I’m not ready to go forward,” Judge Jesic said, explaining he still had 17 boxes of material to read through. He said a second issue was the election of a new district attorney in Los Angeles County. “Out of respect for the new administration coming in, I want the new administration to be able to go through the documents and have their say.”
Kitty’s 92-year-old sister Joan Andersen VanderMolen testified she wants her nephews released. She said the brothers were molested by their father. “No child should have to endure what Erik and Lyle lived through at the hands of their father. It breaks my heart that my sister Kitty knew what was happening and did nothing about it, that we knew of,” she said under questioning by Lyle and Erik’s lawyer, Mark Geragos. “They never knew if tonight would be the night when they would be raped. …It’s time for them to come home. No child should have to live day by day [wondering] if that night, their dad would come and rape them.”
José’s older sister, Teresita Baralt, 85, testified that she loved her “baby brother” and that Kitty was her “best friend.” Still, through tears, she said “it’s time for [her nephews] to come home.”
“We miss those that are gone, tremendously, but we miss the kids too,” Baralt said on the witness stand in a packed courtroom in Van Nuys, California. “I would like some leniency to have them back. Thirty-five years, it’s a long time [to be in prison]. I think they have been rehabilitated. They have done a lot of good things. They went to college. They could have done a lot of bad things [while incarcerated]. They didn’t.”
Baralt said Lyle lived with her family when he attended Princeton and that Erik was only three months older than her youngest daughter. She said visiting the brothers while they’re housed at a California prison in San Diego is very difficult for her. “I would like to be able to see them and hug them, not in the jail. I want them to come home so I can hug them and see them. They were raised with [my four daughters]. It’s been difficult,” she said.
Brock Lunsford, the assistant head deputy of the DA’s post-conviction unit, asked Baralt to address the nature of the case. “I’m not trying to be indelicate, but do you know why Erik and Lyle are in prison?” he asked.
“Oh, absolutely. They killed their parents. We were the executors of the estate, so we were quite close,” she said. “Have you ever made a mistake and paid for it for 35 years? Whether you’re sorry or not, it’s been a long time.”
Lyle, 56, and Erik, 53, were sentenced to life without the possibility of parole in 1996. They’ve spent the last three decades behind bars and had little hope of ever seeing the outside world again after exhausting their appeals process. But then outgoing Los Angeles District Attorney George Gascón recommended the resentencing in late October. A reform-minded prosecutor, Gascón said he believed the move was “appropriate” considering the brothers’ exemplary behavior behind bars. Gascón also made public comments citing new evidence corroborating the brothers’ claims of sexual abuse at the hands of their father.
The fate of the resentencing effort was cast into doubt when Gascón lost his bid for re-election earlier this month. The new incoming DA, Nathan Hochman, has signaled he wants to conduct his own exhaustive review of the case before moving ahead. If he throws his support behind Gascón’s push for a new sentence of life with parole, the brothers could be found immediately eligible for release, with their release then in the hands of California’s parole board and ultimately Gov. Gavin Newsom, who could veto a decision in their favor. Last week, Newsom said he would wait for Hochman to weigh in on the case before issuing any decision on a parallel request for clemency.
Lyle Menendez was 21 and Erik was 18 when they fatally shot their parents multiple times each in the den of their mansion. An initial televised trial ended with two hung juries — one for each brother. The brothers claimed they were sexually abused by their entertainment-executive father and feared for their lives after a heated confrontation with both parents outside the den regarding the family’s alleged incest secret. “I thought my dad was going to come up to my room and have sex, and I thought they were going to kill us,” Erik testified at the first trial. Prosecutors alleged the brothers ambushed and killed their parents out of hatred and greed.
At a second trial, the judge declined to allow cameras, ruled that the brothers would share a single jury, and limited the number of defense witnesses who could testify about the alleged abuse. For example, the brothers’ older cousin, Diane VanderMolen, testified at the first trial that when she stayed at the Menendez home for a summer when she was 16 and Lyle was only eight, he came into her room and said he was afraid to sleep alone because his father would come in and touch his genitals. Diane’s testimony was excluded from the second trial.
Lyle and Erik were convicted of first-degree murder at their 1995 retrial. Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Stanley Weisberg sentenced each brother to two consecutive life sentences, with no possibility of parole, sparing them the death penalty.
After the convictions, journalist Robert Rand obtained a letter that Erik allegedly wrote to his cousin, Andy Cano, eight months before the shooting deaths, when he was 17. In the letter excerpted in a subsequent habeas petition, Erik described being abused by his father and how fearful he was. “It’s still happening Andy but it’s worse for me now,” Erik wrote. “I never know when it’s going to happen and its driving me crazy. Every night I stay up thinking he might come in.… He’s warned me a 100 times about telling anyone.” (Andy Cano is now deceased.)
In his 2023 Peacock docuseries, Menendez + Menudo: Boys Betrayed, Rand also detailed new allegations from Roy Rossello, a former member of the Puerto Rican boy band Menudo. Rossello claimed that José Menendez, a music executive, had sexually abused him, too.
More than a dozen members of the brothers’ extended family have campaigned for the release, ramping up their efforts this year. At a press conference in October, Joan Andersen VanderMolen said she believes evidence that the brothers were routinely sexually abused by their father would have been accepted and portrayed in a much different light if the brothers’ trial took place today.
“For many years, I struggled [with] what happened in my sister’s family. It was a nightmare none of us could have imagined. But as details of Lyle’s and Erik’s abuse came to light, it became clear that their actions, while tragic, were the desperate response of two boys trying to survive the unspeakable,” Andersen VanderMolen said. She said the brothers were “just children” when they were “brutalized in the most horrific way,” and that at the time of their trial, the world was “not ready” to believe that young men could be victims of sexual assault.
“This was a crime of passion. They’re not going to go out and kill random people. At their core, they’re good people,” Sylvia Bolock, a niece of José Menendez, told Rolling Stone after Gascón announced his decision to recommend resentencing. “It’s been such a long time since this happened … Obviously, they’ve learned from their mistakes. There are so many good things they’ve done since they’ve been in prison.”
But not every family member supports resentencing. Kitty’s 90-year-old brother, Milton Andersen, filed a victim impact statement last week, urging the court to keep the “blood brothers” locked up. Andersen said he fears for his own safety if they’re released.
“After 30 years of my continuing efforts to keep those two in prison I am sure they hate me and my two sons as well. The blood brothers might decide that we should be next. My fear of these two killers is something real and should be considered in the resentencing of these two,” Andersen wrote. “My two sons are very much concerned that we will have to be looking over our shoulders for the rest of our lives. I have a concealed carry license and if they are released, I will advise my sons to do the same.”
During the court hearing Monday, Geragos asked Joan about her younger brother, Milton. She called him an outlier, saying every other member of the family “absolutely” supports the resentencing. “He doesn’t know what he’s talking about,” she said of Milton.