Los Angeles County’s top prosecutor announced on Thursday that his office was reviewing new evidence in the case of Lyle and Erik Menendez, saying that investigators were attempting to determine whether the infamous brothers should be retried or resentenced for the 1989 murder of their parents.
George Gascón, the county district attorney, said in a news conference that his office had received a newly discovered photocopy of a letter from one of the brothers, sent to a relative months before the murders, in which he claimed he’d been sexually molested by their father, Jose Menendez.
Defense lawyers also approached Gascón’s office with evidence regarding a former boy band member who claimed in a docuseries last year that Jose Menendez drugged and raped him as a teenager in the 1980s.
“We are not ready at this point to say we believe or do not believe this information,” Gascón said. “We are here to say we have a moral and ethical obliogation to review what has been given to us.”
The district attorney was careful to reiterate that authorities still believe the Menendez brothers were “clearly the murderers” in the case.
A hearing on the matter has been scheduled for Nov. 29.
The announcement comes just days after Talia Menendez, Erik’s daughter, said on her Instagram Story that the family was expecting the district attorney’s office to make a decision on the brothers’ latest appeal for freedom, filed last May.
The Menendezes were sentenced to life in prison in 1996 after being convicted of killing their parents seven years prior. They have been behind bars for nearly 35 years.
Erik and Lyle were 18 and and 21, respectively, when Jose and Kitty Menendez were found slaughtered in the family’s multimillion-dollar Beverly Hills mansion. The brothers, who summoned police to the scene, initially claimed the double murder had been a gangland killing.
Investigators later arrested the pair, saying that they’d bought two 12-gauge shotguns and gunned their parents down in the living room as they watched TV.
The bloody case generated lurid headlines and captured international scrutiny. A fresh wave of attention, generated primarily by a splashy new Netflix series created by Ryan Murphy, has yanked the spotlight back onto the brothers in recent weeks.
This is a breaking story and will be updated.
