Lyle Menendez
Appearances
20/20
The Crime Scene: The Menendez Brothers' Fight For Freedom
I just told him, I don't, I don't. I just told him that I didn't want to do this and that it hurt me. And he said that he didn't mean to hurt me. He loved me.
Dateline NBC
Talking Dateline: The Menendez Brothers: Chance at Freedom
Yeah. Solution is to kill your mother.
Dateline NBC
The Menendez Brothers: Chance at Freedom
He's saying he thinks that they killed their parents.
Dateline NBC
The Menendez Brothers: Chance at Freedom
My father looked like the perfect family man. I think we've come to realize today that that can be very deceiving.
Dateline NBC
The Menendez Brothers: Chance at Freedom
Definitely. I was silent through everything. My father's rapes, I said nothing. For you to have done this to my brother, it was like I kept my part of that sort of devil's pack. And you didn't. And my mother just... Do you let your children wake up in the home of a child molester every day?
Dateline NBC
The Menendez Brothers: Chance at Freedom
My mother was very cruel. She just very much resented my brother and I from... early on.
Dateline NBC
The Menendez Brothers: Chance at Freedom
Yes. Okay. Exactly. But certainly that weekend of my parents' death and what happened is when I really learned that my mother knew all along and really had made a choice. You know, I mean, she made her choice to choose her marriage over her children.
Dateline NBC
The Menendez Brothers: Chance at Freedom
But I certainly felt, I think, fear of my father's reaction to the possible exposure, something that we just knew was just unthinkable. We knew that we were in grave danger.
Dateline NBC
The Menendez Brothers: Chance at Freedom
We didn't decide to do it. There was a moment we finally... just kind of got overwhelmed with this panic and emotion and made the decision to run in that room.
Dateline NBC
The Menendez Brothers: Chance at Freedom
We reminded him of what the original prosecutor still says about him.
Dateline NBC
The Menendez Brothers: Chance at Freedom
avoid some level of responsibility by blaming abuse when the abuse doesn't appear to have been so bad as to as to cause a person to do that i don't know how you can take more responsibility than taking the stand and admitting that you killed your parents explaining fully why talking about things that are horrific things to talk about about your childhood the other
Dateline NBC
The Menendez Brothers: Chance at Freedom
Yeah. Well, certainly in the state of mind I'm in now, that would be the decision I would make. But, said Lyle, back then he thought... A person like my father is not going to allow you to just take something that will ruin his life that he has so carefully crafted. He's not going to. He's not going to.
Dateline NBC
The Menendez Brothers: Chance at Freedom
But leave and do what? Leave and just wait for yourself to be killed in a parking lot?
Dateline NBC
The Menendez Brothers: Chance at Freedom
I don't think I was grief-stricken. I think I was just absolutely broken down with stress. Both of us were just in such a state of trauma that I just... It just poured through on that call. It made it very easy to make that call, really.
Dateline NBC
The Menendez Brothers: Chance at Freedom
I mean, I don't think... I was going to tell the Beverly Hills Police Department, you know, I killed my parents and here's why. And they were going to go, OK, go back home. So just self-preservation at that point.
Dateline NBC
The Menendez Brothers: Chance at Freedom
This case should have been settled. There are like 200 to 300 parasite cases a year where a parent is killed by a child, and they are almost all related to abuse, and they are almost all settled. This case they picked out as different.
Dateline NBC
The Menendez Brothers: Chance at Freedom
Exactly. And I think that it was very easy because it was Beverly Hills, my father had a lot of money, to sort of sell this headline that these brothers killed for money.
Dateline NBC
The Menendez Brothers: Chance at Freedom
I was horrified I did not want to tell the public and my family and people in the jail know that I had been sexually abused. I didn't want that out.
Dateline NBC
The Menendez Brothers: Chance at Freedom
My father looked like the perfect family man. And I think we've come to realize today that that can be very deceiving.
Dateline NBC
The Menendez Brothers: Chance at Freedom
Right, exactly. That kind of image is not easily pierced with this kind of news. And certainly not back then. And not even in the 90s. when I was in trial, were people really believing that someone like my father was a child molester, or that a mother would cover it up. And they couldn't get past that. In the 90s, I wasn't just up against the prosecution.
Dateline NBC
The Menendez Brothers: Chance at Freedom
We were up against the myth that boys aren't sexually abused, that CEOs and upstanding people like my father aren't child molesters. that those are deviants in the shadows, that dysfunctional families don't happen in wealthy homes. So we had to deal with those myths back then.
Dateline NBC
The Menendez Brothers: Chance at Freedom
Today, a lot of that is debunked, and people realize now that they come, child blessers come in all these forms, all walks of life, and that boys are sexually abused.
Dateline NBC
The Menendez Brothers: Chance at Freedom
We were up against the myth that boys aren't sexually abused. that CEOs and upstanding people like my father aren't child molesters.
Dateline NBC
The Menendez Brothers: Chance at Freedom
People were afraid of him. There was no way he was going to let this secret get out. But you could have left. But leave and do what?