Money, power, lies, violence: the murder of José and Mary Menéndez at the hands of their sons, Lyle and Erik, has all the makings of a crime story for the ages. But, unless you happened to be living in the US in the early 1990s, chances are you’d never heard of the case before Ryan Murphy’s latest series, Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story, hit Netflix this week.

The case certainly isn’t nearly as famous as the one covered in the debut season of Monster – that of serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer – or Murphy’s American Crime Story docudramas focusing on the OJ Simpson trial, the assassination of Gianni Versace, and the Monica Lewinsky scandal. What the Menéndez story does have, however, is a cast of reprehensible characters so slippery that you can never quite be sure who’s telling the truth or if anyone (including the show itself) can be trusted. So, let’s try and get to the bottom of what really happened, shall we?

The facts: on 20 August 1989 José and Mary (Kitty) Menéndez were shot to death in their Beverly Hills home by their sons Joseph Lyle and Erik Galen. The brothers then attended the Taste of LA food festival, apparently to provide themselves with an alibi, before returning home and reporting the murders to the police who, due to José’s supposed mob connections, initially overlooked the brothers as suspects and failed to swab them for gunshot residue and other physical evidence.

Which brings us about 20 minutes into the first episode of Monsters. The series never attempts to dispute the brothers’ guilt – but instead interrogates the lengths, or supposed lengths, a person may go to when backed into a corner. The question at the heart of the series is: did the Menéndez brothers kill their parents because they had no choice, or did what unfolded once they were arrested occur because they were found out? Or, as Ryan Murphy would perhaps put it, who are the real monsters in this case – and how did they get that way?

The brothers were arrested in early March 1990 after tapes of Erik confessing to his therapist were shared with the police by a jilted mistress. In the intervening months, having inherited their parents’ $14.5 million fortune, the brothers had blown through more than $700,000 on, among other extravagances, buying a restaurant in New Jersey, adjoining apartments in LA, a full-time tennis coach, supercars and luxury watches.

Despite their initial pleas of innocence, this very public spending spree, along with Dominick Dunne’s sensational 1990 Vanity Fair scoop purporting to have found a first-hand witness to the boys’ actions, left little doubt in the public mind that the Menéndez brothers were guilty. Seeing the writing on the wall, and having been denied bail and already spent three years in prison, the brothers changed their plea. So why did two boys who had seemingly grown up with every privilege imaginable commit such a violent crime?

If the story told by the brothers’ defence team at trial is to be believed, it is they, not their parents, who were the real victims. Subjected to years of pain and abuse by a paedophile father and complicit mother, the boys were driven to kill only when they feared for their own lives after threatening to out their parents’ crimes.

However, by its very nature, a murder story is one-sided and, as is so often the case, history rarely remembers the victims. Despite their huge wealth and proximity to power – José was purportedly toying with a run for senator at the time of his death – very little about the parents’ lives was documented. Not that this stopped Ryan Murphy having a good stab at giving them a back story.

In a retelling of the family’s life from the perspective of José and Kitty, Monsters depicts the couple’s marriage as happy, but increasingly tense once their sons were born. José – a Cuban immigrant who pulled himself up by his bootstraps to huge success – is an overbearing tiger dad who can’t understand why his coddled sons are going off the rails. Kitty is a bored, ignored and borderline alcoholic housewife self-medicating to numb the chaos of a home domineered by her fiery husband and wayward sons. Both had suffered varying forms of abuse in their own childhoods. There’s no doubt that life in the Menéndez household was difficult – but was there abuse enough to vindicate the boys’ brutal actions?

“It is the talk of the town, because it's the best show in town”

Dominick Dunne

What isn’t up for debate, however, is the role the court of public opinion played in the brothers' trial. One of the first to be aired live on Court TV, the trial’s graphic descriptions of sexual abuse combined with the star power of Erik’s lawyer, Leslie Abramson, gripped the US across its six-month course, becoming an unavoidable topic of conversation at bars and dinner parties. And, while the brothers’ testimonies were convincing enough to result in a hung jury and retrial, their new celebrity also garnered a legion of fans which, from their bubble of naive privilege and the shelter of prison, the brothers were ill-equipped to deal with.

In 1991 Lyle responded to an adoring letter from a fan named Norma Novelli. The pair embarked on a years-long relationship over the phone, during which Menendez consented to their phone calls being taped, with the idea being that the pair would eventually release a co-authored book about his life. Whether this was always Novelli’s plan, or if she simply had a change of heart about her ‘boyfriend’s’ crimes, in 1995, shortly before the brothers’ second trial was due to commence, Novelli released a solo tome containing the transcripts of their conversations – much of which was in direct contradiction to the testimony Lyle had given during the first trial.

Consequently, with the more charismatic Lyle unable to take the stand, and with public attention diverted by the trial of OJ Simpson (although there is nothing to suggest, as Monsters depicts, that the Menéndez brothers ever met Simpson), a far less explosive untelevised second trial saw both brothers convicted of first-degree murder in March 1996. The pair were sentenced to two consecutive life sentences each, narrowingly missing the death penalty, and sent to separate prisons.

Thirty-five years on, both brothers still maintain their story of abuse, and have embarked on lengthy and exhaustive appeals processes, with fresh hearings requested as recently as 2023, when musician Roy Rosselló alleged he had been abused by José while visiting the Menéndez home aged 14. For now, the pair remain in prison but were finally reunited in 2018 – 22 years after they had last seen each other.

Monsters, for its part, squarely concludes that the brothers’ story of abuse is nothing but a falsehood. Whichever side of the divide you fall on, what the series makes clear is that our fascination with true crime dramas – especially when they take place among the wealth, beauty and glamour of Tinseltown – is as strong as ever. Or, as Dominick Dunne put it in his 1993 Vanity Fair Courtroom Notebook from the trial, “It is the talk of the town, because it's the best show in town.”

Read more: How Selling Sunset has reshaped the IRL real estate business