By Robert Rand
Earlier this week, I had no idea how Tuesday would go. For the past three years, my reporting partner Nery Ynclan and I have been in the middle of an intense investigation. We couldn’t tell anybody what we were doing
The last time I visited Lyle Menendez at the R.J. Donovan Correctional Facility near San Diego was February 2020.
Within weeks, California, like the rest of the world, would be locked down because of COVID-19.
Sure, we were all unhappy to be stuck at home, but imagine trying to survive the plague while packed in prison!
The virus was not a problem at Donovan until December; that’s when a shock outbreak — 700 new cases in one week — turned the sprawling lockup into a pandemic penitentiary.
Lyle and Erik, luckily, were never infected. They are now fully vaccinated.
Lyle and Erik are headed back to court for their retrial. Here are all the odd facts, bizarre characters, and untold stories you need to appreciate round two including, of course, a cameo by OJ. himself.
As the only journalist who covered the 1989 investigation and the trials in 1993-94 and 1995, I want to welcome the thousands of new supporters of the Menendez brothers. You are collectively responsible for over 800 million views of Menendez TikToks as
On the night of August 20, 1989, the last night in the lives of Jose and Kitty Menendez, their elegant residential street in Beverly Hills was so still you could hear a leaf drop. That in itself was neither unusual nor something to arouse suspicion. People pay a steep price to live in such neighborhoods, and they cherish their peace and quiet.
I’ve done hundreds of interviews since I began covering the Menendez Brothers story in the Fall of 1989. You never forget your first: on March 9, 1990, I appeared via satellite from my home in Miami Beach on Hard Copy 24 hours after Lyle Menedez’s
Finally! Twenty-seven years after two juries were seated for the trial of Lyle and Erik Menendez, the rebooted Court TV has posted the ENTIRE six-month-long court proceedings (even the heated evidence hearings) on their website.
Two juries in the first trial – one for each brother – heard 101 witnesses and examined 405 exhibits over 85 days of testimony that ran from July 20 to December 3, 1993. The case ended with two mistrials in January 1994 after neither brother’s jury could agree on a verdict.
Now, you can watch the trial and see everything the juries saw.
In the eighteen months since the release of The Menendez Murders, I’ve heard from hundreds of people who have read (or listened) to my book. People reach out on social media, through this website and by writing reviews on Amazon.
Here’s an example of my favorite type of message — a reader who has changed her opinion about Lyle and Erik Menendez after learning the details of their case through my reporting.
This note came from Meg in Michigan a few days ago:
There are four different versions of what happened the night of October 31, 1989.
That’s when Erik Menendez confessed to Dr. Jerome Oziel that he and his brother, Lyle, had killed their parents.
This is a tragedy that destroyed a family. All four of them had remarkable strengths as well as terrible weaknesses and it did not have to be. If at any time over the course of the lives of the four Menendez family members some effective person could have intervened, everyone would still be alive and well and healing. All four of them needed help. And there never was any help for this family.
— Defense Attorney Leslie Abramson, the day before sentencing