Although Beverly Hills brothers Lyle and Eric Menendez didn’t get away with the murder of their mother and father, it was a perfect crime in one respect: it set the stage for the last three decades of our current media obsession with sensational true crime stories.
The twisting, turning saga of the patricidal siblings – who were convicted of the 1989 shotgun slaying of their parents, film executive Jose Menendez and his wife Kitty in 1996 after one of the most highly public trials of the 20th Century – is revisited in Ryan Murphy’s Netflix series, “Monsters: The Lyle and Eric Menendez Story.”
And while the Netflix series has stirred controversy with its interpretation of events, that very contention serves as a potent reminder of just how deeply the brothers’ journey through the justice system dominated the cultural conversation of its time, and in doing so created an infrastructure built to effectively deliver all sorts of lurid, high-profile crime content to ever-hungrier audiences.
The setting was certainly irresistible: by 1989, Beverly Hills – with its long history of an abundance of wealth, privilege and Hollywood pedigrees, along with the then-recent rise of Rodeo Drive as an epicenter of conspicuous consumption – was ingrained in the popular imagination as the capital of over-the-tip glitz and glamour, with hit films like “Beverly Hills Cop” and, later, “Pretty Woman” hinting at a dark side underneath the amusingly opulent sheen.
And historically, real-world crime set in that city, like the 1929 murder-suicide at Greystone Mansion, the 1958 killing of Lana Turner’s mobster beau Johnny Stompanato and subsequent cases sparked frenzies of media attention. I began my journalism career at a local newspaper in Beverly Hills as the Menendez trial was concluding. While my book “Beverly Hills Noir: Crime, Sin & Scandal in 90210” chronicles several more of the gilded city’s shocking-but-true transgressions, and how that famous zip code poured kerosene on local crimes to fuel their notoriety, I opted not to reexamine the brothers’ tale in this first volume, due to its oft-told nature and epic scale.
The crime itself was appropriately, almost unthinkably horrific: the alleged culprits were two seemingly pampered scions of privilege accused of coldly and calculatedly murdering their parents in their home in a scheme to claim the family fortune. Everything around the case offered a buzzy name-drop: they schemed at locales like then-trendy The Cheesecake Factory, set their alibi at a screening of the megahit movie “Batman” and later spent wildly on lavish indulgences like Rolex watches.
By the time the case came to trial in 1993, the public was duly saturated with coverage from a media increasingly adept at inventing more innovative ways to consume it. For a decade, the ascent of cable television and advent of news networks like CNN had newly initiated a 24/7 news cycle; network newsmagazines, like newbie hit “Dateline” and surging “20/20,” adapted the more in-depth reporting pioneered by “60 Minutes” and were exploding in popularity, expanding to multiple primetime slots each week. A tsunami of afternoon talk shows from “Oprah” to “Geraldo” had hours to fill, while a new breed of syndicated fare like “A Current Affair” and “Inside Edition” told seamy stories through a tabloid lens. In print, Vanity Fair successfully re-launched in part by supercharging its crimes-of-the-rich-and-famous coverage with the unvarnished courtroom reporting of Dominick Dunne, who’d lost his own daughter to murder.
From the get-go, the Menendez saga was catnip to them all.
But nothing brought viewers deeper into the story than Court TV, which launched two years after the murders and by the time of the brothers’ trial was able to take its audience directly into the courtroom for virtually every moment. And curious viewers found the legal proceedings even more dramatic than the daytime dramas that typically populated the TV timeslots, especially when the defense dropped a megaton bombshell by introducing what became known as the “Abuse Excuse,” insisting the brothers’ heinous act had been motivated by years of brutal emotional and sexual abuse at their father’s hands. Now audiences could watch in real time, debating whether Lyle and Eric’s anguished performances on the witness stand were authentic or merely theatrics.
Viewers were hooked, the courtroom drama lasted for years before the dramatic conviction, more juicy content filtered into even more newsstand headlines and more TV segments across the dial. And a new network’s relevance was firmly established.
Pop culture’s newly immersive true crime genre was bolstered and burnished by its subsequent coverage of further felonies in the Menendez mold as the 1990s delivered a succession of “Crimes of the Century,” among them the assault on Olympian Nancy Kerrigan, the mysterious murder of child pageant queen JonBenet Ramsey, the assassination of fashion designer Gianni Versace, and of course the genre’s all-consuming ne plus ultra, the pursuit and trial of NFL icon and Hollywood star O.J. Simpson for the murder of his ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman.
True crime with a glitzy twist had always captivated the public’s fancy and horror, from long before Jack the Ripper and well after the Manson Family, but now a ravenous, never-satiated appetite had been created: over time, new players like Discovery’s investigative series entered the fray, while coverage splintered into specialty subgenres, like serial killers, cold cases, forensic mysteries or celebrities – particularly young, sexy starlets – spinning out of control.
Scripted television borrowed liberally from the genre, with the “CSI” franchise leaning into the public’s newfound fascination with forensic science or Lifetime’s ripped-from-the-headlines TV movies; true crime book sales escalated, hooking readers with their increased familiarity with infamous tales or investigative procedure; a proliferation of podcasts exhumed and re-examined countless cases; and most recently streaming brought even more explorations of startling cases famous and obscure, through meticulously researched docuseries like “The Jinx” (itself a Beverly Hills-adjacent case) or dramatizations like Murphy’s “American Crime Story” and, now, his much-debated “Monsters,” bringing everything full circle back to the brothers.
Indeed, even as the series resurrects old debates about the Menendez brothers’ motivation and innocence, it’s clear this case ignited our cultural true crime preoccupation to over-the-top proportions, in the most Beverly Hills manner possible.
Scott Huver is a veteran entertainment journalist and author of the true crime anthology Beverly Hills Noir: Crime, Sin & Scandal in 90210, available Oct. 1.
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