Get to Know the Menendez Brothers: A Look at the Notorious Siblings Who Made Headlines for Murder – Hollywood Life
View gallery
Lyle and Erik Menendez continue to serve life sentences in prison for the brutal murders of their parents on August 20, 1989, when the brothers—then 21 and 18—shot and killed them in their family’s Beverly Hills mansion.
Now, 35 years later, the Menendez brothers are the latest subjects of Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan‘s Monster anthology series. Titled Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story, the series stars Nicholas Alexander Chavez and Cooper Koch as Lyle and Erik, with Javier Bardem and Chloë Sevigny portraying their parents, Jose and Kitty Menendez. The first edition of the true-crime saga, which focused on serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer and starred Evan Peters as the “Milwaukee Cannibal,” garnered 1 billion hours of views within its first 60 days on Netflix.
The 10-episode season, streaming Sept. 19 on Netflix, intends to explore whether the Menendez brothers were cold-blooded killers seeking to inherit their family’s fortune, as the prosecution argued, or victims of a lifetime of physical, emotional, and sexual abuse at the hands of their parents, as the defense claimed and the brothers maintain to this day.
Before diving into the series, here are five things to know about Lyle, now 56, and Erik, 53.