Blood Ties: The Menendez Brothers

Abramson: What was in front of you?

My parents.

Woman: It's not supposed to happen in Beverly Hills.

A movie executive and his wife

were brutally slain in their million-dollar mansion.

Rand: To most people, this was the perfect all-American family.

Bozanich: People assume that if you have money,

you have no problems, and you're certainly

not going to do anything like kill your parents.

Hercz: To me, it was like a movie.

I thought, the whole time, it was done by the mafia.

Bozanich: One kid killing the parents is a bad seed.

Two kids killing the parents is a bad family.

Moran: If you looked at the MENENDEZ brothers as teenagers,

you saw spoiled rich kids spinning out of control.

If I killed my parents,

I don't think I'd buy a Porsche the first week.

I'm just a normal kid.

Oh, Erik!

You're a normal kid who killed your parents.

Yeah. I know.

Moran: It was a spectacle.

Zamos: It's like the crowds in the Roman coliseum.

You know, blood. They smell blood.

My name is Lyle MENENDEZ.

I have been in prison for 26 years.

I am the kid who did kill his parents.

And no river of tears has changed that,

and no amount of regret has changed it.

You are often defined by a few moments of your life,

but that's not who you are in your life, you know?

Your life is your totality of it.

If you survive it, you're left having to explain it,

and it's just almost impossible to explain.

I think I will end up dying still being in the nightmare

of this horrifying event and tragedy.

Man: Bring down the Berlin wall.

Moran: Lyle and Erik MENENDEZ seemed to have it all.

They lived in this fairy-tale world of wealth

and country clubs.

They were top-flight tennis players,

one of them at Princeton, the other one heading to ucla.

They were rich.

Their father was a powerful Hollywood executive.

They had achieved the American dream.

They were living in the mansion in Beverly Hills.

They were living behind the gate.

So, on the outside, to most people,

this was the perfect all-American family.

Bozanich: People assume that if you have money,

you have no problems, and you're certainly not

going to do anything like kill your parents

because you've got it made.

And it turns out that rich people have

dysfunctional families just as much as poor people.

One kid killing the parents is a bad seed.

Two kids killing the parents is a bad family.

Jose MENENDEZ was an immigrant.

He wanted to make good, and he was very driven

to become the American success story.

Andersen: He immigrated from Cuba at about the age of 16.

He was the only boy, and mother adored him

and emphasized his machismo and his male image so much so

that he became a little bit of a bully in Cuba,

and he became a little bit of a monster to the parents.

It was hard to control him.

Here is a Cuban immigrant coming to this country

as a teenager with very little, driving, driving, driving

through industry after industry...

Rental cars, music industry, Hollywood production,

one after another with this ferocious drive and talent.

Rand: Jose and kitty MENENDEZ met when they were both students

at southern Illinois university.

Andersen: Kitty, who was my sister, my younger sister,

she was stunningly beautiful.

And I mean beautiful on the outside

and even more so on the inside.

Jose saw in her what everybody else saw in her,

and she saw this handsome Cuban.

They got married when they were both in college,

and then, after graduation, they moved to New York.

Man: The sniper's bullet cut down Dr. King.

Rand: The most significant change in the marriage

of Jose and kitty MENENDEZ took place when their sons,

Erik and Lyle, were born.

Kitty MENENDEZ had dreams of becoming an actress,

and after her sons were born, Jose basically told her,

"you can't work. You need to take care of our sons."

Andersen: The boys were extremely spoiled.

I would tell kitty, "you know, there's got to be

some discipline in their life somewhat,

and I think it would be smart for you to rein them in

a little bit and hold them accountable

for some of the things that they do."

And of course she would come right back with,

"Brian, don't tell me how to raise my boys."

She wanted Lyle and Erik to be as competitive as she was

and as her husband was.

Moran: When I think of Jose MENENDEZ and his sons,

the word that pops into my head is ownership.

There were his prized thoroughbreds, his sons.

They were going to reflect his own glory,

and if they didn't, god help them.

The world that the MENENDEZ brothers grew up in

was very affluent,

and it started in Princeton, New Jersey.

Moran: Jose had success on both coasts.

First the leafy precincts of Princeton, New Jersey,

on the east coast, and then all the way in California,

in Beverly Hills,

one of the legendary luxurious places of the world.

In Princeton, we saw them as rich kids.

They were, like, a step above everybody else.

Princeton was about old money, and you didn't show off,

but they were different.

As Jose changed jobs and became involved

with different companies, this beautiful home

in the center of Princeton came on the market,

and they just both fell in love with it,

and they wound up buying it.

And so this is beautiful, stately, up there

with a beautiful sort of a reservoir or retention pond

behind the home, which, again, is also beautiful,

and she was so proud of it.

Jose and kitty MENENDEZ were very concerned

about the facade of their family.

They wanted the public image to be perfect.

And one of the ways they did that was they did

their sons' homework, so their homework was always perfect.

And then they would take tests in school,

and they would fail the tests.

Another way was to tell their sons who they could date,

who they could be friends with.

Hercz: Lyle and Erik were very influenced

by what their father thought,

and they wanted, at all times, to please dad.

Bozanich: The affluence was all around them,

but they were expected to work for it,

and the work was to become tennis stars.

Moran: They were going to be at the country club

owning the scene there.

They were going to have beautiful girls on their arms

and go to Ivy league top-notch colleges.

Hercz: He gave them everything in Princeton,

limousine rides to New York, limo rides to school,

because in that extent, he was showing off through the kids.

Rand: Lyle MENENDEZ was going to be the better,

improved version of Jose.

For Jose MENENDEZ, having a son go to an Ivy league school

like Princeton was the end of the American dream.

But Lyle MENENDEZ had mediocre grades,

was not a great student.

He really wasn't Princeton material.

He was a very strong tennis player,

and so through a combination of his tennis abilities,

and also Jose MENENDEZ made a $50,000 donation to Princeton,

he was able to actually get his son into the school.

But Lyle was flunking out of Princeton not only academically

but socially.

He was doing things he wasn't supposed to do.

He was accused at one point of plagiarizing a paper,

and he was suspended for that.

Jose MENENDEZ rushed in to meet with the Dean

and to try to save his son, to try to stop the suspension,

but his pleas didn't work.

Hercz: Joe was never satisfied.

Lyle and Erik, I think, had a strong fear of dad.

It was so obvious, but it was not spoken.

Moran: Jose was such a dominant force in that family

that the brothers looked at him, it was like he was the sun

and blotted everything else out.

The impression I got about Jose MENENDEZ's character

was that he could be charming when he chose to,

but that his basic nature was very abusive,

and that he was abusive to his sons, especially,

and to his wife.

Describe your relationship with your father?

Brutal.

Painful.

Torturous.

And yet, I admired him because he was so strong,

and he was everything that success was,

that I was taught that success was,

and I thought that he was the most powerful

and brilliant person I had ever met.

To me, the MENENDEZ brothers became homicidal monsters

that were shaped by Jose MENENDEZ.

My fellow Americans, I have spoken to you

from this historic office...

Rand: For 20 years, the MENENDEZ family

had been living in Princeton, New Jersey.

And then Jose became executive with CAROLCO pictures

and live entertainment,

and the family moved to California in 1987.

Initially, the MENENDEZ family lived in

the Los Angeles suburb of CALABASAS.

Andersen: And they were really, really proud to have this house

that they had found there and they were remodeling it.

It was tennis courts and everything else available there,

and this is just the most beautiful setting.