New script turn in the Menéndez case. The brothers, in prison for having killed their parents in 1989, have received a hard blow this week. The California probation Board have denied the famous prisoners the possibility of leaving jail in the short term. Lyle Menéndez, 57, heard the refusal this Friday in a session that lasted eleven hours. His brother Erik, 54, did it on the eve in another extensive view of ten hours. They are marathon durations of procedures that usually take between three or four hours. Both may request the benefit in three years, when a new hearing is allowed before the commissioners of the Board.
The members of the Board strongly criticized Lyle for their behavior within prison. He was accused of having a mobile inside the San Diego Correctional Center and even selling devices to other inmates. When breaking the rules it is more difficult to give green light to an inmate to return to society, the commissioners explained. On Thursday, the authorities also rebuked Erik for their conduct within the prison.
Julie Garland, the commissioner who supervises Lyle’s rehabilitation process, urged him not to lose hope. “We believe that your remorse is genuine. In many ways, you have been a model inmate,” Garland told him. He referred to the work that Menéndez makes as a mentor with other inmates in several programs. “Don’t be someone different from closed doors,” he recriminated.
After being protagonists for years of documentary macabros and fictions based on the murder of their parents, the Menéndez have recovered their voice. In prison since they were arrested in March 1990, when Lyle had 21 and Erik 18, the brothers tried to argue why they consider it time to recover their freedom. It is the first opportunity they had to request probation. This thanks to a judge.
Lyle, the eldest, was questioned for his behavior in the months that followed the murder of José and Kitty Menéndez in August 1989 in the family mansion of Beverly Hills. Throughout six months, still freely, he manipulated relatives to support him and manufactured witnesses to reduce his responsibility in the trial. “I felt very bad to lied to my family just when they were mourning,” he admitted.
“Dad was going to rape that night”
While everyone was awaiting the opinion of the Board on the future of Lyle, the local company of the ABC company published part of the audios of the Marathonian session of Erik Menéndez in front of the authorities. The filtration caused the Lyle audience to be interrupted for a few hours, which ended eleven hours after starting. The public could hear for the first time in years the voice of the double homicide and its version of the facts.
“Dad was going to my room and rape me. That was going to happen, one way or another. So I ran to the car to look for the gun, I loaded it … All this without Lyle. I knew I had to do it,” says Erik Menéndez. “Don’t you think there were other options?” Question one of the commissioners. “I understand now as a healthy individual, but for that person it was simply inconceivable to escape that situation,” Menéndez replied.
At another time, the younger brother, who was 18 when he committed the crime, explained the values in which he grew up. “In my house I was not afraid to steal, but they were catching you doing it. My father presumed to be able to do anything outside the law and benefit from it. I did not grow with many moral foundations, in fact I grew up in an opposite way, to have a amoral base,” says Erik at another time.
Commissioner Robert Barton, who supervises Erik’s case, wanted to know why the brothers chose to kill their mother after shooting at their father, an alleged sexual predator. “Does at no time go through your head rescue your mother from him?” Barton asks Menéndez.
“Several incidents made it clear that my mother would not be on our side (…) When I found a suicidal letter from my mother I told him not to do so, that he left him and we went to New Jersey back. She told me that my dad was a great man and that he was never going to leave him,” he recalled.
For Erik everything changed when he learned that his mother knew about the sexual abuse that his father committed against his children. “I couldn’t see them differently. Today I know that my mother was a victim of my father. I should have seen it in a different way. But that night I saw them as a single person,” he confessed.
The audio publication caused a stir on social networks and among people close to the case. Tiffani Lucero-Pastor charged against the authorities of the California Prison Department for filtration. The brothers’ lawyer also strongly criticized the institution, which seems to have delivered the audios by mistake after a journalistic request. “I think they have not realized what they have done. This family has worked hard to protect their privacy and dignity,” said lawyer Heidi Rummel.
In one of the recordings you can hear how Barton denies probation to Erik Menéndez. “Many of us can improve in some things, but neglect others. And when we talk about criminal thoughts, it is essential that you show that you have changed,” said the commissioner. Barton, however, opened the door for Erik to request a new audience before the period of three years.
