Erik and Lyle Menendez are now a huge step closer to possibly going home.
Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Michael Jesic recalled the brothers’ sentences of life without parole in a dramatic reversal of fortune at a court hearing Tuesday. He then resentenced the brothers to 50 years to life, making them immediately eligible for parole in connection with the 1989 shotgun slayings of their parents, José and Kitty Menendez.
The brothers each addressed the court before hearing their fates. “I make no excuses and offer no justification,” Lyle said in a lengthy statement, appearing by video from his prison in San Diego. “I take full responsibility for my choices. The choice to confront my dad about the abuse. The choice to keep the family secret instead of asking for help. The choice to stay instead of leave. The choice to buy guns and ammunition. The choice to point a gun at my mom and dad and shoot them. The choice to reload, return to the den, and run up to my mom on the floor and shoot her again.”
His voice quivering, Lyle also expressed regret for his choice, after his arrest, “to make a mockery of the criminal justice system by soliciting perjury.” It was a jaw-dropping moment considering prosecutors stated over and over earlier in the day that the brothers did not deserve resentencing because they had not admitted they asked people to lie for them to cover their tracks. Deputy District Attorney Habib Balian specifically accused Lyle of having attempted to recruit a former girlfriend, Jamie Pisarcik, to falsely testify that José had drugged and violently raped her.
Lyle said Tuesday that he’s spent the last 35 years “trying to understand who I was and why I made those horrific choices.” He said he was “immature, impulsive, emotionally isolated” and “in a co-dependent relationship” with his younger brother, Erik, with whom he shared the “traumatic bond” of allegedly having been sexually abused by their father.
“My choice to buy guns did not come from logic or reason. I was scared but also filled with rage. I’m so sorry I didn’t ask for help. I should have trusted someone: a relative, the police, a parish priest,” he said.
At the end of the statement, Erik leaned over and placed a hand on Lyle’s shoulder before addressing the court next. “On Aug. 20, 1989, I committed an atrocious act of brutality,” he said after putting on his glasses. “My actions were criminal. They were also selfish, cruel, and cowardly. … I have no excuse.”
Erik said he feels responsible “like no one else,” even though he was barely 18 years old at the time. “I reached out to my 21-year-old brother [and] convinced him we couldn’t escape. I’m the one who was too ashamed to turn to my family or anyone else. [Instead], I bought guns and ammunition and barged into the den where my parents were and fired all five rounds. I went back out to the car to get more ammunition and didn’t stop until my parents were dead.”
Reading from a written statement like his brother, Erik admitted he concocted an alibi about having been at a movie theater and did everything he could “to get away with my crimes.” He apologized to his family members for having “stolen” José and Kitty and said he plans to spend the rest of his life helping others.
After the judge rendered the new sentence and ended the hearing, Erik smiled and waved to relatives in the courtroom. Lyle, sitting beside him, nodded to the group visible to him via a courtroom camera. Three of the relatives had testified earlier in the day, asking Judge Jesic to release the brothers on time served. Outside the courtroom, family members expressed their hopes the parole process will move swiftly.
“I’m very emotional. They deserve release. I hope the parole board will grant it on June 13, at their hearing. It would mean the world to our family and my mom to see them,” cousin Diane VanderMolen tells Rolling Stone. In morning testimony, she and two other cousins took the witness stand and said the brothers had accepted responsibility for their actions and were not a danger to society.
“On both sides of the family, we believe that 35 years is enough,” cousin Anamaria Baralt testified. “They are universally forgiven by everybody in our family, and we are very hopeful that they can get a second chance at life.”
Erik, 54, and Lyle, 57, have spent the last 35 years behind bars for the grisly killings inside the family’s mansion. After an initial televised trial ended with two hung juries — one for each brother — Lyle and Erik were convicted of murder at a follow-up trial and sentenced to life without the possibility of parole in 1996.
At trial, the brothers said they suffered years of sexual abuse at the hands of their father and believed their parents had plans to kill them to keep a lid on the family’s dark secret. Prosecutors argued the brothers acted out of greed, resorting to murder to get their multimillion-dollar inheritances before being cut out of their parents’ will.
In her testimony Tuesday, cousin Diane VanderMolen recounted some of what she told jurors during the brothers’ first trial. She recalled how Lyle had shared with her when he was a child that his father had been molesting him. She also described the “hallway rule” inside the Menendez family’s home. (Her testimony about the alleged sexual abuse was not allowed at the second trial.)
“When José was with one of the boys, you weren’t allowed to go down the hall,” she testified Tuesday. She said no one dared challenge José because he was incredibly “intimidating.” She explained that while Kitty once had been like a second mother and mentor to her, Kitty’s personality “greatly changed” after she allegedly discovered José “was having an affair.”
“José was so powerful. And Kitty became the enforcer,” VanderMolen testified in a soft voice. She said Erik and Lyle were scared of their parents when they carried out the grisly slayings. “They were afraid, plain and simple.”
“They did not see a way out,” she testified. “Afterward, after getting older, they realize now that they would have had other opportunities.”
Judge Jesic set the crucial hearing last week after L.A. District Attorney Nathan Hochman tried to derail it. The process was initiated by Hochman’s more liberal predecessor, George Gascón, last October. Gascón said he considered the brothers’ young ages at the time of the killings — Erik was 18 and Lyle was 21 — and the brothers’ exemplary behavior behind bars. He said they had paid their “debt” to society and should be eligible for parole, immediately.
Another cousin, Tamara Lucera Goodell, testified Tuesday that the brothers have been rehabilitated. She pointed to the green space, hospice, and meditation programs for other inmates that they’ve started behind bars and asked the judge to strike down their life sentence so her bedridden 93-year-old grandmother, Joan VanderMolen, Kitty’s sister, would have a chance to see them in person before she dies.
“For 35 years, I have watched my entire family spiral during different conversations about what happened,” she testified. “I watched my grandmother and my aunts [be] traumatized. It would help them, in their healing.” She said her grandmother’s family had “a long of history of abuse in multiple forms.”
“My grandmother moved out at 17 so she would not continue the cycle of abuse. And [it was hard] for her to learn that that cycle of abuse was continued by her sister, in the very forms that she and her sisters survived,” she said. “[Release] would bring a lot of closure for all of us.”
Baralt, whose mother is José’s older sister, said her elderly mother is ill with stage four cancer and hopes the brothers will be released while she’s still alive. “We are on borrowed time at this point,” she said.
Joan, 93, and Baralt’s mother, Teresita Baralt, 85, testified at a hearing last November that they supported the brothers’ release. “No child should have to endure what Erik and Lyle lived through at the hands of their father,” Joan said on the witness stand. “It breaks my heart that my sister Kitty knew what was happening and did nothing about it, that we knew of,” she said under questioning by Mark Geragos, the lawyer representing the brothers.
Anamaria Baralt testified Tuesday that her entire adult life has been consumed by the “relentless” scrutiny of the high-profile homicides. “It has been torture, for decades, to have to live out that kind of trauma in the public eye,” she said. As a relative of both the victims in the case and the perpetrators, “the trauma is 360 degrees,” she said.
Baralt said she has “no hesitation” supporting release. Asked by a prosecutor if she would have guessed back in early 1989 that the brothers were capable of killing their parents, she said no. But she added that everyone is older and wiser now. After the hearing, she was wiping tears.
“I’m so happy,” Baralt tells Rolling Stone. “I’m glad I wore waterproof mascara.”
Geragos argued during the hearing that if the brothers had been sisters, they never would have been convicted. “Anybody who’s got a couple of neurons firing knows that back in the 1990s, we had a completely different understanding of child abuse and child molestation,” he said. Geragos said that during the first trial, the men on the jury “couldn’t bring themselves” to vote for the lesser charge of manslaughter, while the women on the jury all voted for manslaughter. He said understanding the “syndrome” of domestic abuse victims was still in its “infancy” and almost “exclusively female” at the time.
“I think they should be released today,” Geragos argued. “This was literally a lifetime ago.”
When he issued his resentencing, Judge Jesic said the brothers committed an “absolutely horrific crime,” but he saw no evidence they were at risk of committing another violent felony if released. He said he was greatly influenced by prison officials vouching for the brothers’ rehabilitation. “As shocking as the crime was, I’m almost equally shocked by some of the letters that I’ve read, mostly from the prisons,” Jesic said. “I think it’s pretty amazing what the defendants have done in prison.”
From Rolling Stone US.