An Oct. 31, 2016 photo provided by the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation shows Erik Menendez, left, and a Feb. 22, 2018 photo provided by the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation shows Lyle Menendez. The Menendez brothers, convicted of killing their parents in their Beverly Hills mansion nearly three decades ago, have been reunited in the Southern California prison San Diego’s R.J. Donovan Correctional Facility. The brothers are serving life sentences for fatally shooting their parents, Jose and Kitty Menendez, in 1989. (California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation)
Lawyers for Erik and Lyle Menendez, the Beverly Hills brothers convicted of murdering their parents in 1989, have filed what they claim is newly-discovered evidence that should earn their clients a new trial.
A letter written by Erik Menendez to his cousin in December 1988 — eight months before the brothers shot and killed Jose and Kitty Menendez on Aug. 20, 1989 — purportedly corroborates allegations of sexual abuse, Los Angeles magazine reported on Wednesday. The letter was part of a habeas corpus petition filed Tuesday by attorney Mark Geragos, who represents the brothers. Geragos is also co-owner of Los Angeles magazine’s parent company.
Geragos also submitted a declaration from a one-time member of the Latin boy band Menudo alleging that Jose Menendez, then a music executive, sexually abused him in the 1980s.
“In short, the new evidence not only shows that Jose Menendez was very much a violent and brutal man who would sexually abuse children, but it strongly suggests that — in fact — he was still abusing Erik Menendez as late as December 1988,” the motion says. “Just as the defense had argued all along.”
Erik’s letter to his cousin Andy Cano “conveys chilling information to Andy” in the letter, including fears that Erik had that his father would hurt him — and that his mother would not protect him.
“At times, I wish I could talk to her [Kitty] about things, you know?” the letter says. “Some day … Especially dad and I but the way she worships him and tells him everything, I (sic) so afraid she’ll tell him whatever I say. I just can’t risk it.”
The letter continues:
Its (sic) still happening Andy but its worse for me now. I can’t explain it. He’s so overweight that I can’t stand to see him. I never know when its (sic) going to happen and its driving me crazy. Every night I stay up thinking he might come in. I need to put it out of my mind. I know what you said before but I’m afraid. You just don’t know dad like I do. He’s crazy! He’s warned me a hundred times about telling anyone especially Lyle. Am I a serious whimpus? I don’t know I’ll make it through this. I can handle it, Andy. I need to stop thinking about it.
The second newly-revealed item of evidence Geragos says should be considered favorable to the brothers is a declaration from Roy Rossello, a former member of the Puerto Rican pop band Menudo.
In a declaration signed in April 2023, Rossello described surviving sexual abuse at the hands of Jose Menendez — revelations first revealed for a documentary called “Menendez+Menudo.”
Music producer Edgardo Diaz created the band in 1977. Rossello joined the band in the 1980s when Jose Menendez was an executive at RCA Records, where the band had a “multi-year deal,” according to Geragos’ petition.
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During a band trip to New York in the fall of 1983 or 1984, Rossello says, Diaz asked Rossello to “do a favor” and join Jose Menendez in a limousine, the filing says.
“Roy did so and was taken to a home in New Jersey, given wine by Jose Menendez and anally raped,” the filing continues. “Roy lost consciousness and woke up back in his hotel. He was bleeding from the anus. He was in unbearable pain for a week.”
Rossello attested to two more instances of sexual abuse, the filing says.
“Had jurors seen the letter Erik Menendez wrote to Andy Cano and learned that Jose Menendez anally raped and orally copulated a 13 or 14-year-old boy in 1984, the prosecutor would not have been able to argue that ‘the abuse never happened,’ ‘[t]here is no corroboration of sexual abuse,’ Jose Menendez was not the ‘kind of man that would’ abuse children and was ‘not a violent and brutal man,”” Geragos argues in the habeas petition.
The Menendez brothers were initially tried in 1993 in a single trial, but before two separate juries, resulting in hung juries for both brothers, the filing says. They were tried again in 1995, this time before a single jury — and without, Geragos says, crucial defense evidence that was allowed in the first trial.
According to the filing, jurors in the first trial heard testimony from Andy Cano, the cousin who received Erik’s letter, that when Erik was 12 or 13 years old, Erik told him that his father was “giving him massages in the genital area and massaging his penis.”
“Erik asked Andy if his father did the same thing and swore him to secrecy,” the filing adds.
Jurors also heard from other cousins and witnesses who testified that they had seen Jose physically abuse Lyle and Erik, including by punching Lyle in the chest and stomach and ordering him to “learn to be a man.”
One cousin testified that when she was visiting the family during the summer of 1976 when Lyle was 8 years old, he came to her bedroom and asked if he could sleep in her room because “he and his dad had been touching each other” in the “genital area,” the filing says. When the cousin told Kitty Menendez about this, she “dragged Lyle away by the arm,” the filing said.
Prosecutors argued that Erik Menendez, then 18, and Lyle Menendez, then 21, killed their parents out of greed and pointed to a post-slaying spending spree by the brothers, including a Porsche, a house, clothes, jewelry, and a restaurant. The brothers were ultimately convicted of murdering their parents and sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
Read the pleading via the Los Angeles Times here.
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