Did the Menendez Brothers confess to their crime?

It’s been more than 30 years since Lyle and Erik Menendez, better known as the murderous Menendez Brothersentered their lavish Beverly Hills home with shotguns and brutally murdered their parents, Jose and Mary Louise Menendez, then aged 45 and 47 respectively. Lyle was 21 and his brother Erik was 18 when they committed the gruesome crime. But how were they caught? Did they confess?

Something like that.

The Menendez brothers murder case is one of the most talked-about murder cases of the 1990s, aside from the OJ Simpson murder case. The story is back in the cultural zeitgeist thanks to a new Netflix series called Monsters: The Story of Lyle and Erik Menendez.

The show is the second in the Sample franchise, the first of which was the controversial supersmash hit DAHMER — Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Storywhich reached over 1 billion viewing hours in just 60 days.

As detailed in the series, the brothers shot their father, a successful entertainment executive, six times before delivering a final blow to the back of his head. The mother was shot a staggering ten times. Due to the particularly brutal nature of the crimes, police believed the killings were mafia-related.

The brothers played the role of the grieving sons perfectly, with Lyle hysterically calling 911 after the murders and uttering the infamous line, “Someone killed my parents.” The brothers’ alibi was that they had gone to prison to Batmanand they had movie tickets to back it up, so the police believed the story at first. But then the two started buying things, making big, expensive purchases that started to raise suspicions.

The brothers spent nearly $1 million on cars, watches and clothes, and Lyle even bought a restaurant chain. Police tried to wire the brothers’ friends to see if they could get a confession, but they were unsuccessful. Things changed when police got a tip from a woman who was the mistress of Dr. Jerome Oziel, a psychologist the boys were seeing. They were arrested in 1990 after Dr. Oziel had recorded a confession.

The tapes were admitted into evidence because Erik threatened Dr. Oziel, violating the confidentiality agreement that protects the privacy of personal information between the two parties from being used in a lawsuit.

In the tapes, which were played in court, we can hear Dr. Oziel talking about their father and how he was controlling and how, “isn’t that what it was all about, killing him?”

Erik replied:

“My father and my mother were… were two people that I loved and… I had no choice. I would have made any other choice… uh, I regret it. I may not have had a choice then, but I regret it now and I just don’t like hearing my father talk like this.”

Despite the confession, the first trial ended in an inconclusive jury. But prosecutors tried again, and in the second trial, the brothers could barely talk about how their parents had abused them, so the jury could not find manslaughter as a charge. This time, they were both convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.