Los Angeles
—
News of the killings was already spreading as the summer sun began to warm the tennis court behind Jose and Kitty Menendez’s gleaming Beverly Hills mansion on August 21,1989.
Across the country, Kitty and Jose’s relatives were learning the couple had been gruesomely shot in their home overnight, reported dead by their sons, Erik and Lyle, in a hysteric 911 call.
“It was like the world went dark,” remembers Kitty’s great-niece, Tamara Lucero Goodell, who was 9 years old.
Told by detectives that the killings may have been the work of organized crime, her family retreated into their home and followed police advice: Shut the blinds, don’t answer the door, and screen phone calls in case the criminals decided to make contact.
Her grandmother, Kitty’s sister Joan VanderMolen, rushed to Los Angeles to be by Erik and Lyle’s side, joining a growing cadre of aunts, uncles and cousins forming a protective bubble around the brothers. Together, they planned to see the brothers through the unthinkable tragedy.
Seven months later, Tamara stood petrified in front of the TV, her older sister sobbing beside her, as a Beverly Hills Police Department detective announced that Erik and Lyle would be arrested as the prime suspects in the killings.
“It was just a very, very sad and somber time,” Tamara said. “There was a lot of confusion.”
Up until the arrests, media coverage of the case “was mostly seen as a Beverly Hills story,” recalls Anamaria Baralt, the daughter of Jose’s sister, Terry Baralt.
“It was the movie executive and his wife. … There was very little attention, even on Erik and Lyle,” Baralt said. But after the arrests, it was “mayhem.”
The sensational turn in the case fueled breathless news coverage as the public became hungry for any revelation about the brothers’ motives or the dark secrets that had been festering inside the Menendez family home.
Detectives flew to New Jersey, where the Menendez family had lived before Jose’s booming entertainment career brought them to California. There, they interviewed Anamaria’s parents, returning over and over again as they built their case. The Baralt family’s home phone became a media hotline, ringing shrilly every hour of the day. Reporters ran after them down the street. Anamaria, who was a freshman in college, walked into classrooms and saw students turn to ask their friends, “Do you know who that is?”
The Menendez murders were well on their way to becoming one of the most notorious crimes in American history.
And privately, the family was splintering.
CNN spoke to three cousins of Erik and Lyle who describe an ever-widening chasm of grief, confusion and shame that consumed their families’ lives as the brothers underwent two highly televised trials. Many of them heard horrific allegations about Jose and Kitty for the first time alongside the public, as the brothers claimed their upbringing had been poisoned by an increasingly indifferent mother and a cruel father who had subjected the boys to years of physical and sexual abuse.
“Every time our family got together, that was the topic of conversation. That was all that was talked about,” said Natascha VanderMolen, Kitty’s great-niece, who asked to be identified by her maiden name. The family, including Joan, has also used the spellings Vander Molen and Vandermolen.
Massive family holidays – usually celebrated by a horde of relatives piling into one home – became smaller and grimmer, Natascha said. Young cousins were told to go play while adults tensely discussed the case. Eventually, the extended family gatherings ceased altogether.
In 1996, Erik and Lyle were sentenced to life without parole and separated into maximum security prisons in California.
Over the next three decades, the scattered network of more than two dozen relatives privately grappled with trauma from the case and, for some, guilt that the alleged abuse had gone unnoticed.
Some never lost contact with Erik and Lyle, while others took years to come to terms with their crime. Eventually, all but one relative – Kitty’s brother Milton Andersen – would come together to advocate for the brothers’ release.
For the past year, the family has thrown its support behind the brothers’ renewed fight for release, but some of them say stepping back into the public eye – and the criminal justice system – has only deepened their emotional scars.
As Erik and Lyle’s first trial approached in 1993, their defense attorneys prepared the family to lay everything bare.
Prosecutors had accused the brothers of murdering their parents for their multimillion-dollar estate after being cut from their father’s will. Their defense, in turn, would argue it was an act of “imperfect” self-defense – a genuine but misguided fear for their lives due to their abusive upbringing.
“I remember my grandmother being very upset that (defense attorney Leslie Abramson) wanted to focus on the abuse and the need to bring that to light,” Tamara said.
Tamara could see the allegations were especially cutting for her grandmother Joan. Joan had fled her own childhood home as a teenager to escape her father, who she has described as abusive, Tamara said.
“To find out that Kitty was complicit in this kind of abuse that they swore they would never participate in and hated their whole lives growing up …. The devastation, I just will never forget,” Tamara said.
On many nights, Tamara would find her grandmother hunched over the kitchen table, poring over trial transcripts in which Erik and Lyle delivered hours of tearful and stomach-churning accounts of beatings, verbal lashings and rape.
“She repeatedly would tell me, ‘I don’t know how I didn’t see it,’” Tamara said.
Jurors, journalists and scores of public onlookers obsessively dissected the case. After jurors were unable to make a decision, the trial ended in a mistrial. During the second trial, the judge limited testimony about sexual abuse. The brothers were convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison.
Over the next three decades, many of their relatives have chosen to remain private from public scrutiny, carefully shielding their connection to the case from colleagues and, at times, their closest friends.
“There was definitely a period, at least in our family, where some of the members required a little bit more time and space to come to terms with the events of what happened,” Anamaria told CNN earlier this year.
For some, the situation felt black and white: The brothers had broken the law and “unequivocally crossed the line,” Tamara said. Kitty’s brother, Milton, insisted until his death earlier this year that his nephews were lying about the abuse.
Over time, and for some over the course of decades, their understanding of the events shifted, the cousins said.
“We had to take a good, hard look at why they did that,” Anamaria said. “They weren’t killers. I mean, they just weren’t violent people. So, you have to have an open enough mind to say, ‘Okay, something really horrible happened that would have caused this.’”
Natascha was just 5 years old when her older cousins were arrested, but she has always remembered one of their last goodbyes.
Erik had visited her family in Arizona the winter before his arrest, stopping through as he traveled for a tennis tournament. As they exchanged farewells in a parking lot, Erik hoisted her into the sprawling desert sky, holding her above his head as she laughed down at him. Before he left, they took a picture against the trunk of a car, a tiny Natascha grinning against Erik in her puffy jacket.
“I have never watched a documentary. I’ve never watched any shows, because this is who Erik is to me,” she said.
For decades, Natascha would receive regular updates about her cousins from their grandmother Joan, but she did not speak to them again until last year, when Lyle called to tell her they had a shot at release.
The Los Angeles County district attorney at the time, George Gascón, was reexamining their case and weighing whether to ask the court to reconsider their life sentence. The family’s support would be essential, she recalled Lyle telling her.
Natascha told him she was eager to help. But she was distracted by a nagging thought.
“Mid conversation, I was like, ‘Are you by Erik right now? … I need you to hand the phone over.’”
After a moment, Erik’s voice came on the line.
“I remember saying, ‘You probably don’t remember me, but I remember you, and I remember … .”
Erik interrupted to finish her sentence, “The parking lot? … Of course I remember you.”
“It felt like we never skipped a beat,” Natascha said.
Natascha was among more than two dozen Menendez relatives who flew to Los Angeles in October last year to deliver an emotional news conference in support of the resentencing bid.
That day, Anamaria looked around and realized her support system had just doubled. As she and Jose’s relatives had been privately struggling, so too had Kitty’s.
“There are a dozen or more people out there that share my exact trauma,” she said. “Immediately, that connection was there, and it was a really beautiful thing.”
A week later, Gascón announced he would ask the court to consider a reduced sentence for Erik and Lyle. The men had become “model prisoners” with a vast record of rehabilitation, he said. If the case was tried today, he argued, updated laws would require the court to consider whether they were victims of abuse.
The victory was short-lived.
Gascón lost his December reelection campaign, ushering in a new district attorney, Nathan Hochman, whose deep skepticism of the brothers roughened the road ahead.
After conducting his own review of the evidence, Hochman concluded in March that Erik and Lyle’s self-defense claim was “fabricated” and said he believed the evidence to corroborate their abuse claims is “extremely lacking.” Though the resentencing hearing would still proceed, Hochman’s office would argue against it in court.
Despite the district attorney’s opposition, a judge ruled in favor of Erik and Lyle in May, granting them a reduced sentence of 50 years to life and opening the door to the possibility of parole.
The brothers’ August parole hearings approached, and the family prepared to share “the most incredibly sensitive, traumatic parts of our lives” with the parole board, Anamaria said. Under California law, the relatives are considered victims of the 1989 crime and had the right to share statements with the board.
But many of the relatives feared that if they spoke during the hearings, their identities would be broadcast to the public after years of fighting to remain private. Few of them shared the Menendez name and worried that audio would allow coworkers, friends or curious neighbors to identify them by their voice. They pleaded with the California Department of Corrections to close the hearings to the media.
Representatives from the corrections victims’ division “worked tirelessly” in the lead-up to the hearings to make sure the family felt informed and protected, Tamara said. Only one reporter would be allowed in and a written transcript would be released after 30 days.
So, when an audio recording of Erik’s hearing was unexpectedly released to a media outlet in the middle of Lyle’s parole hearing, the family was overcome with shock and fury.
The day before, during Erik’s hearing, the relatives had emotionally exhausted themselves, the cousins said. They delivered accounts of the deep divisions the crime created in their family, the generational trauma it has inflicted, and stories of tearful moments of remorse they had shared with Erik.
Suddenly, several relatives who had spoken during Erik’s hearing feared their statements would be made public and announced they would no longer speak on behalf of Lyle.
“Is nothing private for us?” Anamaria said. “Can we just have this one moment where they can express themselves without anyone watching?”
Lyle’s hearing descended into disorder as the Menendez brothers’ attorneys and family members erupted into disbelief over the release.
The family insisted they were never informed that an audio recording would be made public.
“I want to know why the state of California and this prison system has wholly dismissed our rights as victims,” shouted Tiffani Lucero Pastor, Tamara’s sister. “This is disgusting.”
The unexpected release of the audio felt “like there was no safety net left,” Tamara told CNN. “It just felt like we were deceived.”
“We just felt robbed of dignity again as a family,” she said.
The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation told the Los Angeles Times at the time that the audio had been “erroneously” released. In a statement to CNN Friday, CDCR said the audio was released to the outlet as part of a public records request, “consistent with” the board’s policy and California law.
Attorneys for Lyle and the family filed a formal objection to the further release of audio, but the parole board denied the request, explaining the recordings were public records. The family did not challenge the denial in court.
CDCR did not address whether it had informed the family the hearing audio would be available to the public. CNN has reached out to the department for further comment.
Both Erik and Lyle were denied parole. Their legal team is considering appealing the parole board’s decisions.
Tamara and her cousins say the audio release is just the latest violation of their rights under Marsy’s Law, a California statute that gives crime victims the rights to privacy, dignity and respect. As they have waded back into the criminal justice system to advocate for Erik and Lyle, they feel the notoriety of the case has overshadowed their feelings as victims.
Anamaria says her family will never forget the moment during an April resentencing hearing in which the district attorney’s office displayed graphic, unredacted images of Jose’s body to the courtroom without warning the family.
Jose’s sister Terry, who had never seen the gruesome photos before, was so distressed that she was hospitalized the next day for a heart issue the family believed was related to the stress, according to Anamaria.
The district attorney’s office in a statement to CNN apologized for “not giving prior warning that the conduct would be described in detail not only in words but also through a crime scene photo.”
“The District Attorney has sought to display respect and compassion for the victim family members as he has pursued the facts and the law of the case in order to fully inform the Court,” the office said.
Though the family filed a court motion accusing the DA’s office of violating Marsy’s Law, it was denied.
“It’s clear that the system doesn’t know what to do with us,” Anamaria said. “We are the victims of violent crime. And I get it – it’s weird and it’s awkward that we’re sitting there and fighting for the perpetrators. I get it, but it doesn’t mean that we’re not the victims.”
While the last year has exposed the family to new pain, it has also invited moments of extraordinary healing, Tamara said.
During their parole hearing, Erik and Lyle both acknowledged the weight of what Erik called a “forever crime” that will impact their family for generations.
“Despite all of this, they’re still here showing up for me, disrupting their lives, dealing with a lot of public scrutiny, still healing with me, and I will never be deserving of it,” Lyle said.
Unable to attend the hearings to hear those words were Joan and Terry, the aging family matriarchs who have never wavered in their support, the cousins said.
“(Joan) was my connection to them my entire childhood. She has always believed in who they are and that they deserve to be out with the rest of the family,” Natascha said. “I think what she’s holding on to right now is to see them.”
Terry, 86, is battling Stage IV cancer and struggles to envision a future in which she does not live to see them freed.
“You can’t ask her about it, because she’ll start sobbing,” Anamaria said. “She is really hopeful that she’s going to get to see them, so we all are too.”
Since last year, the brothers’ options have narrowed. Their petition for a new trial was denied last month by a judge, and their clemency petition has languished on California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s desk.
Even so, the family feels release is closer than ever. The cousins are encouraged that the board will allow both brothers to be eligible for parole again in three years. If they maintain clean records, they could move the second parole hearing up to as soon as 18 months.
“We’re still winning at this point,” Anamaria said. “They are going to get out, they are going to return home, and we are hanging our hat on that.”
This story has been updated with additional information.
Correction:
A photo caption in a previous version of this story misidentified Arnold VanderMolen. He is Kitty Menendez’s brother-in-law.
