Lyle and Erik Menendez were convicted of murdering their parents in Beverly Hills in 1989. The second installment of Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan’s Netflix anthology series, Monsters: The Story of Lyle and Erik Menendezrevisits the infamous true crime story. Read on to discover where the Menendez brothers are now and the new evidence that could set them free.

On August 20, 1989, Jose and Kitty Menendez were found shot multiple times at close range in the family room of their Beverly Hills mansion. Police initially suspected Mafia involvement due to the gruesome nature of the killings. Lyle and Erik, who were 21 and 18 at the time, told detectives that they found their parents shot to death when they returned home.

After their parents’ deaths, the Menendez brothers appeared to spend their inheritance lavishly on Rolex watches, real estate, and business ventures. A major break in the case came when Judalon Smyth, the mistress of Erik’s psychologist, Jerome Oziel, tipped off authorities. She revealed that Erik had confessed to the murders during therapy sessions and that there were audiotapes of the confessions.

Why did Lyle and Erik Menendez kill their parents?

In March 1990, the brothers were arrested for the premeditated murder of their parents. The case led to a highly publicized legal battle that lasted several years, with two juries, two trials, and one mistrial. Menendez’s defense team argued that the brothers killed their parents in self-defense. Both brothers testified that they had been abused by their mother and father.

However, prosecutors argued that money was the motive. They alleged that the brothers wanted control of their parents’ $14.5 million estate. The brothers allegedly spent up to $700,000 of their inheritance on luxury items, business ventures and travel.

The first trial ended in a mistrial on January 13, 1994. The jurors could not agree on whether to convict the brothers of manslaughter for the alleged abuse or of first-degree murder.

Ultimately, at the end of the second trial, the jury found Lyle and Erik Menendez guilty of first-degree murder. The brothers were sentenced to two consecutive life sentences without the possibility of parole.

Where are Lyle and Erik Menendez now?

Erik and Lyle Menendez are serving life sentences at the RJ Donovan Correctional Facility in San Diego, California, according to the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. The brothers are not eligible for parole.

After their conviction, the two men were transferred to separate prisons. The last time they saw each other was in 1996, when they could see each other from across the prison, but could not communicate. Separate transports took them to different facilities.

Lyle has repeatedly requested a transfer closer to his brother over the years. On February 22, 2018, he was transferred from Mule Creek State Prison in Northern California to the Richard J. Donovan Correctional Facility in San Diego, where Erik had been incarcerated since 2013.

On April 4, 2018, the brothers were finally reunited when Erik moved into Lyle’s unit. Journalist Robert Rand told ABC News that when the guard opened the door, Lyle saw his brother and they both “immediately burst into tears.”

“They just hugged for a few minutes without saying a word to each other,” Rand added. “Then the prison officials had them spend an hour together in a room.”

In January 2017, Lyle said ABC News that he had made peace with his actions. “I’m the child who killed his parents, and no amount of tears has changed that and no amount of regret has changed that,” he explained. “I accept that. You’re often defined by a few moments in your life, but that’s not who you are in your life, you know. Your life is your totality… You can’t change it. You’re just stuck with the decisions that you’ve made.”

Lyle still maintains that they experienced abuse at the hands of their father, which he says has bonded him and his brother Erik through secrets. “It’s so painful and complicated and confusing,” he said. “We have an intimacy that comes from that shared experience … (and) the bond becomes very big and intense.”

“I’m the older brother, so I try to protect Erik pretty well growing up, but mostly I try to survive,” Lyle continued. “It was pretty devastating to finally realize that I hadn’t been able to protect him or save him from the horrible abuse that I thought I had. I thought we had survived our early childhood pretty well, but that turned out not to be true.”

Although Erik declined to be interviewed by ABC News in 2017, he told ABC’s Barbara Walters in a 1996 interview that he felt “tremendous remorse” for the killings. “There’s not a day that goes by that I don’t think about what happened and I wish I could take that moment back,” he said at the time.

What new evidence supports Lyle and Erik Mendendez’s allegations of abuse?

The question now is not whether Lyle and Erik Menendez killed their parents, but whether they did so out of fear and self-defense after a lifetime of abuse. New evidence could support that claim, and the brothers’ attorney, Cliff Gardner, hopes to secure their release.

The newly discovered evidence includes a letter Gardner said was written by Erik Menendez to his cousin Andy Cano in December 1988, about eight months before the crime, CBS News reported.

Part of the letter reads: “I’ve tried to avoid Dad. It still happens, Andy, but it’s worse for me now. … Every night I stay up thinking he might come in. … I’m scared. … He’s crazy. He’s warned me a hundred times not to tell anyone, especially Lyle.”

Andy Cano testified at the brothers’ trials, saying that Erik told him — years before the murder — that his father touched him inappropriately. However, prosecutors at the trial suggested that Cano was lying, CBS News reported.

In April 2023, Roy Rosselló, a former member of the Puerto Rican boy band Menudo, alleged that Erik and Lyle’s father, Jose, sexually abused him as a teenager.

In an affidavit filed in 2023, Rosselló said that in the fall of 1983 or 1984, as a teenager, he visited Jose Menendez’s home. He said he drank “a glass of wine” and felt “no control” over his body afterward. He alleged that Jose took him into a room and raped him. Rosselló also stated in the affidavit that Jose sexually abused him on two other occasions.

“I know what he did to me in his home,” Rosselló said in the Peacock docuseries Menendez + Menudo: Boys Betrayedaccording to People. “That’s the man right there who raped me… That’s the pedophile.”

Erik responded to Rosselló’s claim in a phone call with Rand, the journalist who has kept in touch with the brothers. “It’s sad to know that there is another victim of my father. I always hoped and believed that the truth about my father would come out one day, but I never wanted it to come out like this – the result of a trauma that another child suffered,” he said.

In May 2023, Gardner filed a habeas petition, presenting the letter and Rossello’s sworn statement as new evidence that his clients’ convictions should be overturned. The Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office told “48 Hours” that it is investigating the allegations in the habeas petition, CBS News reported.

Check out the official trailer for Monsters: The Story of Lyle and Erik Menendez below.