Shocking call the Menendez brothers made after killing their parents
by Alice Wade · Mail OnlineShocking audio shows the moment killers Lyle and Erik Menendez pretended to discover their parents dead bodies and make a frantic 911 call.
The Menendez brothers, who are now 56 and 54 and behind bars, killed their parents in 1989 - in a case that shook America.
In a shocking clip, they pretended they were walking into a murder scene when they dialled 911 after shooting their parents dead.
The siblings are the subject of a new Netflix drama, released today, created by Ryan Murphy.
The controversial new drama, Monsters, dramatises the chilling the chilling tale of the brothers - and the sinister motives behind the murders as well as the haunting trial that followed.
Before admitting the crimes, the brother initially claimed that they had been at the cinema and come back to find the bodies of their parents, Jose, 45, and Kitty, 47, both shot dead in their family home.
During the haunting audio clip, the brothers are heard calling Beverly Hills Emergency line. The call handler is met with the sounds of shrieks as they repeatedly ask 'What's the problem' in an increasingly concerned tone.
After the call is answered, Lyle said: 'Yes, please, ah.... We're the sons of,' barely able to finish his sentence.
Lyle then wailed: 'Someone killed by parents,' while his brother, Erik howls in the background.
Aghast, the receiver responds asking 'What, by who? Are they still there?' to which Lyle initially said yes, before quickly going back on himself saying 'no, no. no'.
Lyle then said indiscriminately 'Erik, man don't!' as the call handler desperately tries to understand what happened, asking 'were they shot?'
Amid his own crying, Lyle exclaimed 'yes' as his brother can also be heard sobbing in the background of the call.
Several times during the call, Lyle screams to 'Erik, Erik' to his brother, who was later revealed in trial to have been in a different room.
The call handler can also be heard telling their senior, 'We have a hysterical person'.
Trying to get to the bottom of the chaos, the second call handler asked who shot the parents. Lyle said: 'I don't know, I just got came home'.
Lyle then screamed at his brother to 'Erik, get away from them'. The call handler then asked if he could speak to Erik, to which he said his brother was 'hysterical'.
The receiver asked Lyle several times if the attacker was still in the house, he said he 'didn't think so' as the now handlers tried to understand what had happened, eventually reassuring Lyle that an ambulance was on its way.
'Okay I gotta go,' he sobbed in response.
During the trial, Lyle was asked if the crying during the call was 'real crying', to which he responded saying that it was.
He said his tears were a result of 'shock' and that he 'couldn't believe' what was happening to him in the moment.
'My parents were dead and I was just about to call the police. It's really hard to describe the weekend and the stress and fear and nervousness,' he said during the trial.
The Ryan Murphy series, titled Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story, stars Javier Bardem and Chloë Sevigny as the Menendez parents, and Nicholas Chavez and Cooper Koch as their sons.
In 1989, Lyle and Erik shot their parents as they sat in their Beverly Hills mansion.
They were tried twice in the murder of their parents, in 1993 and 1996, and became tabloid sensations after the boys claimed that Jose molested them.
The real case of the Menendez brother recaptures the story that divided the nation, with many divided over whether or not the brothers deserved to spend the rest of their lives in jail.
After the murders took place August 1989, the Menendez brothers were arrested in n March 1990 for their parents’ murders and placed on trial. They were found guilty, and and remain in prison, thirty-five-years on from the murders.
What happened to Jose and Kitty Menendez?
On August 20, 1989, Lyle, a then-22-year-old Princeton student, and Erik, a then-19-year-old professional tennis player, walked into the den of their $5 million Beverly Hills mansion and shot Jose point blank in the back of the head, before turning the gun on their mother as she tried to run from the room.
In total, they shot Jose five times and Kitty, nine.
After they killed their parents, both brothers discarded of the guns on Mulholland Drive, and bought tickets to the cinema to see a movie, then returned home to the crime scene where Lyle had called 911, reportedly 'hysterical' over the scene in their living room.
At first they pleaded their innocence, adding that the mob may have carried out the killings - given both parents were shot in the knees.
Later the case took a twist when the brothers confessed to the murders through their Beverly Hills therapist Jerome Oziel.
His girlfriend Judalon Smyth went to police after she heard an audiotape of a therapy session in which the brothers discussed the killings.
Lyle Mendez was arrested on March 8 in 1990 outside of his parents' home and Erik was arrested at the Los Angeles International Airport two days later.
The trial and re-trial of Lyle and Erik Menendez
Prosecutors believed that Lyle and Erik killed their parents because they wanted unfettered access to their $14 million estate, with both of them going on a spending spree and buying Rolex watches, condominiums, sports cars, and expensive other items in the months after the murders.
The pair were trailed twice, during which the siblings told a disturbing tale of how they were molested by their father from a young age, and were forced to touch one another when they were little - ultimately leaving them fearing for their life and desperate for a way out.
During the first trial, the brothers claimed that they confronted their father about his alleged abuse, and he became enraged – forcing them to kill out of concern for their safety. However, it had a hung jury and was ultimately ruled a mistrial.
The pair were re-trialed together, and their claims of abuse ruled inadmissible by a judge. Both Lyle and Erik were convicted in 1996 of brutally killing their father, Jose Menendez, a powerful music executive, and their mother, Mary Louise 'Kitty' Menendez, a former beauty queen.
The brothers' case was boosted in 2023 when Roy Rossello, a former singer in boy band Menudo, claimed that their father had raped him at 13.
The Menendezs' lawyers also filed a recently unearthed letter that Erik sent his cousin Andy Cano about eight months before the killings.
'I've been trying to avoid dad,' the hand-scrawled message read.
'It's still happening, Andy, but it's worse for me now. I can't explain it. He is so overweight that I can't stand to see him.
'I never know when it's going to happen and it's driving me crazy. Every night, I stay up thinking he might to 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.'
Their cousin testified that when Erik was 13, he came to him and told him that his father Jose was touching and 'massaging' his genitals, asking if that was normal.
Another one of their cousins' named Diane Vander Molen, also said that Lyle spoke about the abuse to her when he was eight years old, and that she went to his mother about his confession, but was told he was lying.