Case File | The Menendez Brothers: The Official Companion Podcast

You're listening to American Criminal.

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From Airship, I'm Jeremy Schwartz, and this is American Criminal.

There's a problem with the telling of true crime stories, and that's the fact that so many of them don't wrap up neatly.

This ain't Hollywood, it's real life.

So instead of a neat conclusion where the evil are punished for their sins and the righteous are celebrated as heroes, you get something else.

And when all is said and done, you're often left with the bitter tang of frustration, mixed with regret and plain old sadness.

Now, for sure, everyone's mileage with each story is going to vary.

Some people see forest, others see trees.

And in the arguments about who's right and who's wrong, stories can take on a new life, even decades after people thought the final chapter had been written.

That's certainly what happened with the Menendez Brothers.

In August 1989, Lyle and Erik shot their parents to death inside the family's Beverly Hills mansion.

The case was a media sensation.

It seemed everyone had heard about it and had opinions about it, even if they didn't know the full story.

Argentinian documentarian Alejandro Hartmann had the same experience as just about everyone.

But I didn't know a lot.

I didn't heard about the abuse.

I didn't heard about more than this, two brothers killing their parents.

Then I dove in.

I got more involved and I began to understand more things.

Like so many of us, Alejandro was sucked into the story.

And the further in he got, the more he felt the drive to understand what had happened inside the Menendez home on Elm Drive.

I began watching all the other documentaries.

I watched some of the scripted material series or films that were there.

I read some books.

I read a lot of articles.

And then I got into the trial.

And when I began watching the trial, I began to have a better impression or a better understanding about Lyle and Erik.

Because the first things I read had a lot of this, you know, this voice killing their parents for the money.

There was a lot of that, especially if you read news from the time, you know, from the 90s.

But once you get into the trial, and I began watching, especially their testimonies, my impression began to change.

Of course, this wasn't all just some late night obsession for Alejandro.

He was making a documentary feature about the story, so he was obligated to look at the case from every angle.

And when he read all the books, poured through all the newspapers, watched the trials, he was ready for the next logical step.

He talked to Lyle and Erik Menendez.

For the first time in 30 years, the brothers told their story together.

I talked with them for more than 20 hours, and we knew a lot of material was going to be out of the documentary.

And it was really interesting material because it was really the first time they talked together.

Both of them talked with the same person, which was me, in 30 years.

So, it was unique in some way.

And we thought that maybe the audience should have the possibility of listening more of these conversations.

When his documentary was finished, Alejandro took those hours of conversations and turned them into a podcast.

And now, with all the attention the case has gotten lately, and with the Los angeles DA taking a fresh look at the brothers' convictions, it feels like a good time to check in on the first story we ever brought to you on American Criminal.

So, for this bonus episode, we're bringing you the first episode from the Menendez Brothers, The Official Podcast.

The three-part series includes the raw, untold stories of the brothers' lives before and after their crimes.

And it's a must-listen for anyone invested in this still-evolving case.

You may have heard this story before, but you haven't experienced it like this.

This is episode one, The First Call.

This podcast contains content which may be upsetting or triggering to some listeners.

Please check the show notes for resources should you need to reach out to someone.

You have a pre-paid call from Lyle Menendez.

An inmate at the RJ.

Donovan Correctional Facility, San Diego, California.

This call and your telephone number will be monitored and recorded.

Um, it's been a journey for me since, I mean, from childhood till now.

I never expected that I would be ever revealing it in such an open way, what happened with my father and with my family and what occurred.

This is Globo Tell Link.

You have a prepaid call from Erik Menendez, an inmate, the RJ Donovan-

When I turned 50, that impacted me.

And I realized, you know, that I was a man of my word, and I want people to have a greater clarity on my life.

So much hasn't been told that should be told.

And the truth of what happened, even the bad things, everything can only bring healing.

This is one of the most sensational crimes ever to explode in Hollywood.

At first, Lyle and Erik Menendez weren't even on investigators' radar.

They later confessed to the killings in therapy.

The brothers testified they killed their parents because they feared for their lives after years of sexual and emotional abuse.

The jury spent days deciding between life and death.

The verdict here was life without parole.

Remorse is not the word.

I would have given my life to go back and change it.

Instead of running from it, trying to escape it and trying to forget it, just embrace who it has made you become.

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I'm Alejandro Hartmann, the director of the Netflix documentary, The Menendez Brothers.

In the film, we tell the story of the Menendez murders through the lens of the televised trial that rocked the nation.

But in this podcast, I wanted to make space for the two brothers behind that story, the people behind it.

Here, we can go beyond the luxury lifestyles, Beverly Hills mansions and tennis tournaments.

We can take a closer look at Lyle and Erik's incredibly complicated relationships with their parents.

We can ask what might have driven them toward such a violent end.

And we can hope that the brothers answer honestly.

As an Argentine filmmaker, I may seem like an unlikely storyteller for an infamous American criminal case.

But even I can remember hearing about it.

Jose and Kitty Menendez were shot to death in their Beverly Hills mansion.

Menendez was on the board of Carlco pictures, the company that produces...

Working with a documentary format gave me the opportunity to show what was happening in society.

That was something that really interested me.

And at the same time, documentary cinema gives you a lot of flexibility because you begin shooting knowing something about what you want to tell, but not knowing everything and the reality changes all the time.

So you have to follow reality.

You have to follow what is happening.

So I have to find this journey of the hero.

I have to find this bad guy that tries the hero not to achieve his goal.

I try to find in a real story those elements.

The story of The Menendez Brothers has each of those elements.

So in early 2022, 30 years after I first heard about the case, I got on board to direct this documentary, The Menendez Brothers.

Right from the start, this project posed some difficulties.

When I began approaching, I probably knew just a little bit about the story.

So I had really fresh eyes.

I saw it for the first time.

I didn't have pre-assumptions at all.

I was hooked by the story.

But something that I was sure about was that I had to talk with these guys.

That was something that I knew that was going to be the difference between any other documentary, to bring both brothers together or separated, but have them together in the same film.

That was my goal.

My brother and I just always felt like we just didn't participate together because we didn't have that faith in the end result.

And it wasn't until I met the team, and this project's team brought in a director who knew nothing about the case, a foreign-based director, who I thought actually afforded an opportunity for him to really do a deep dive and figure out what really happened and not be biased by this media machine that had really biased people in the 90s and early 2000s.

My position as an outsider, my fresh eyes, were a large part of what drew Lyle to be willing to participate in this project.

So from the beginning, I wanted to make sure we did this story justice, with all its nuances, gray areas, threats and tangents.

It was a challenge to get to the brothers.

You can't just call them on the phone.

They were convicted of murder.

They are in prison.

Because of this, they can't receive calls.

They have to decide to call you.

That meant we had to get in touch with someone who could get a message to them.

So we reached out through their wives.

But only one brother was open to our initial offer.

Lyle.

You know, prior to talking to Lyle, I was really nervous.

Hello?

This is Global Television.

You have a prepaid call from…

Lyle Menendez.

an inmate at the RJ.

Donovan Correctional Facility, San Diego, California.

This call and your telephone number will be monitored and recorded.

Hi.

Hello, Alejandro.

Hi, Lyle.

How are you?

I am doing fine.

How's your week been?

Fine, fine, fine.

I'm very busy week, but here I am.

Sure.

I'm quite sure.

Yeah.

How is the place you talk with me?

Could you try to describe to me the place where you talk to me?

It's just basically like the old public pay phones back before the Internet.

They're just on the wall in each day room.

They're called big day rooms.

Similar to a college dorm situation where you would have different rooms around one central day room, you just come wait in line, get the chair, and you can make a call, and as many times as you want, there's really no limitation depending on how many people want to use them.

There's somebody on the phone a few feet away from me, and a few feet away on the other side, and the microwave is shared by water fountains and so on.

And so in this day room with water fountains and microwaves, Lyle began to speak with me.

Eventually, we would get to a point where we could discuss the most sensitive details of this case, the abuse, the murders.

But our conversations started out much more slowly.

This is Globo Challenge.

You have a pre-paid call from Lyle Menendez.

And in, Ada, the RJ Donovan Correctional Papillote, San Diego, California.

Hi, Lyle.

Hey, Alejandro.

How you doing?

Fine.

How are you?

I'm doing good.

Start the week off good.

Welcome to Globo Challenge.

Hi.

Hey, Alejandro.

Hi.

We had some little bit of drama this morning.

One of my roommates got what they call rolled up from Jacob to the Administrator Segregation, like we call it the whole.

Thank you for meeting Globo Challenge.

Hey, Alejandro.

Hi, Lyle.

How are you doing?

How are you?

How's it going this week?

Are you in the United states, right?

Yeah, I'm in Los angeles.

Well, how was your week?

Are you okay?

Yeah.

I got a little bit of a walk.

Can I begin recording?

It's okay?

Yeah.

Okay.

You remember, anytime you want me to stop, you just say it, okay?

So with Lyle, it began like a chat, like a normal chat.

And eventually, over the time, I let him talk, but it was super slow.

And you have to have in account that the phone calls from prison, they just last 15 minutes and they cut.

So every time it cut, I had to wait to see if he called me back or not, because sometimes there was more people in the line waiting for the phone.

You have 60 seconds remaining.

I didn't hear you.

Hello, hello, do you hear me?

Hello, hello, do you hear me?

Hi, hi.

No?

Hello?

No?

Let me call back, maybe we can...

Talking to Lyle, at the beginning, it was just to know each other, but things began to appear in those chats.

And the first day we began chatting, I don't know, a couple of hours or an hour.

Then we arranged for the next week.

And I started super shyly, because I have seen parts of the trial, I knew something about Lyle, and I wasn't sure how openly he would talk about these things.

With Lyle, sometimes it was a challenge to get him to speak frankly.

Years of media attention and interviews meant that Lyle had already shaped the way he spoke about certain things.

Lyle, at the beginning, he used words like, what we did, what happened that night, not talking directly about the fact.

He's admitting that something happened, something very horrible, and he put some adjectives to it, but not talking directly.

When you are able to name it, to put it in words, then it becomes real and everything opens in some way.

For Lyle to talk about the night, about the murders he and his brother committed, he first needed me to understand what they've been through, what their parents, José and Kiriti Menendez, had put them through.

There was an obsession of drive to be stronger, better, and to win.

You know, if you think that your son is a lion, and everyone is a sheep, and you come from a family of lions, and that was not something I just thought of now, like, that was ingrained in us, right?

That you're a lion, you refuse to sleep, to eat, and to walk with the sheep.

Like, what will your son be doing with his time?

You're not going to let him sit around and smoke cigarettes and hang out with his derelict friends the way you look at him.

What do you consider weak?

That didn't matter.

That was how you lived your life, you know, at the pinnacle of strength.

That sort of connection with my father as sort of like a lion, the concept of lion among sheep.

Like the lions don't talk about the other lions abusing them, or if they sexually abuse you as a child, like that's weakness.

Like that's unimaginable.

I'm sure my father felt cursed with sons who were emotional and, you know, weak.

A lot of the training activity and the way he structured my life was to try to drive that out of me.

And he consistently lived his life that way and talked about it.

And you just didn't, you know, I learned early not to cry around him, no matter what.

You did not cry, you did not show pain, weakness.

And it was, you know, that was just how it was growing up.

So I could say it was like normal, but there was nothing normal about it.

Lyle spoke to me about many things.

But it wasn't until we began to talk about his brother that I truly felt I was getting a window into their world.

How is your brother in your eyes?

How would you describe him compared to you?

My brother and I are similar in a lot of respects.

I mean, he's just very different than he was.

My brother, at that time, back then, that weekend, and in that period was a little more easily overwhelmed.

I would say more likely suicidal, at times, depressed.

And so he was highly emotional, very hard to cry, immature, you know, not even though he was turn 18, like very young 18.

I was very worried that he would be a suicide risk, but he turned his life around.

I think he's more confident than I ever thought he could be.

I think he's more, he has a better mental health than I expected him to have as somebody who's so damaged coming out of childhood.

So what's your relation with him now?

My brother and I have always had a very special bond.

I do think that if you're in homes with severe abuse, I think it's common to be closer because you're feeling needed to emotionally protect each other really often, or hide from that kind of abuse really often together, and that just sort of continued through our life.

And so we're more like twins than a couple of years apart.

And I think that the trauma has just sort of bonded us.

I mean, there are certain levels of trauma that we just, we don't share, we don't want to relive them together, so we don't.

But the love and bond and everything else, it's just, it's never changed.

I did interviews to Lyle for months, and Erik didn't want to talk, so we began with Lyle.

But eventually, the months passed, and some day, out of nothing, Erik said, okay, let's do it.

And that was just because Lyle told him, hey, you should meet this guy.

He asked different questions than we are used to.

So Erik said, okay, let's try it.

Hello?

Hi?

Hi.

Hi.

Do you hear me?

Hello.

Do you hear me?

Okay.

Yeah.

Let's begin with a brief presentation.

Who are you?

Just present yourself with your age and whatever you want to add to that.

My name is Erik Menendez.

I am calling you from the Richard J.

Donovan Correctional Facility in San Diego, California.

I am 51 years old.

With Lyle, I felt like I had to build trust brick by brick.

Each 15-minute chat got us closer to a deep intimacy.

But with Erik, the floodgates were open from our very first call.

My core belief as a child was that I was not good enough, that I wasn't worthy of being in the family, that I wasn't as good as Lyle, that Lyle was better than me in tennis, and he was better at me than school, that he was better looking and more intelligent and more charismatic.

The theme of the story that my parents told us, which was that Lyle was the golden child, and so I looked up to Lyle tremendously.

And when Lyle told me he was proud of me, that was a major deal for me.

I'll give you an example.

I remember specifically Lyle was playing in the finals of the tri-state area in the 18 and under, and I was playing in the finals of the 16 and under, and Lyle won his match.

And then the entire family went over to see if I would win.

And I remember being in the second set in the tiebreaker, and Lyle nervously watching, wanting me, willing me to win.

And I lost.

And the humiliation and shame that I brought on the family for losing, I just believed that I could not do the things that Lyle could do.

So while I competed against Lyle's records, I didn't believe I could get up to them.

And I viewed him as the only person that genuinely loved me, for me, that loved me no matter what.

With Erik, my approach was totally different, completely different, because at that point, I was talking to Lyle for probably five months.

So I had a lot of experience on talking with Menendez.

So now with Erik, as we had a little time, I felt more comfortable to go directly to the points.

In the most soft way I could go.

He talked more directly about the abuse, he talked more directly and more frankly, let's say, about what happened that night, than Lyle.

And those are the personalities.

We were both two boys just trying to be happy in our lives, but we were going through a lot of trauma and torture together.

And so much of our childhood was like going through war together.

He and I had experienced things that no other people that we know experienced.

One of the things that I think that the baby isn't well understood is how much Lyle protected me as a child.

I would hear Lyle getting hit or beat or he would hear me getting whipped.

I would see if my dad got angry and grabbed Lyle and drag him off to a room.

And then I would hear the screaming and his punishment.

And I would know if I would be next.

Throughout this process, I've been struck by the voices of the two brothers.

It's possible you have noticed yourself.

They sound very similar, nearly indistinguishable from one another.

But I have found that if you listen to what is being said more than the voice that is saying it, there is a world of difference between the two.

Between Erik...

My father was a dangerous man who believed in violence.

He loved us, but he believed that love needed to be art.

And Lyle...

Over the course of our conversations, I have discovered very personal things about each of the brothers.

Their upbringing, their relationships with one another, and their feelings toward their parents.

As I did, I found myself struggling with the reality of why I was speaking with them in the first place, their horrible crime.

But the question of punishment is not where my interest lies.

I want to know what could have driven them to commit such a crime in the first place.

What does it take to push two young men so far past their breaking point that they spiral over the edge into a world where murder feels like the only way out?

And what does it mean to reckon with that decision 30 years later?

To place yourself within the brothers' psyches over the last 30 years, you first need to understand the night that everything changed.

This memory, the murders, the night it all happened, was a subject that both brothers were very hesitant to open up about.

From the outside, the Menendez family seemed to be operating as usual in the weeks leading up to the crime during the summer of 1999.

Lyle had just gotten a condo in Princeton, New Jersey, for university.

And Erik was pursuing tennis at the highest levels, looking toward the future at UCLA.

But underneath all that, the brothers started putting together a plan, a plan that would take the lives of both their parents and change the course of their own lives forever.

It started days before with the brothers buying a pair of shortcuts.

But who had the idea of buying it?

It wasn't a good idea.

It was an insane idea.

It was a horrible idea.

And that was a terrible idea.

And I wished I could go back in time and undo that idea.

I don't remember how it was used.

We were just so afraid.

We didn't know.

I don't think we were thinking clearly.

And it seemed like having a gun would give us some protection.

But it was a terrible idea.

In August, life inside the Menendez home began to spiral out of control.

Only two members of the household during that time remain.

So we only have their perspective.

The other two, who could speak to the story, are dead.

Lyle never did open up widely to me about the days leading up to the murders.

But Erik was willing to go there with me, and shared where his mind was at in those days.

I remember thinking during that week, that Friday and Saturday, how unsafe I was.

At any time, dad could have burst into the room.

And the gun did not make me feel safer.

I just knew that I was never going to allow my dad to come in the room and touch me again.

That's the only thing that I knew for certain.

In a way, I had made that...

I had tried to make that decision before, when I was 17.

And I had psyched myself up to say no.

Because I had beaten into myself that I was coward, that I was letting this happen to me, that if anyone found out, it was just too humiliating to live with.

And that if I was a man, I would be stopping this.

And so I said no to my dad when I was 17.

I told him no.

And he went and he got a knife, and he put it at my throat, and he told me that he should kill me.

And that if I ever said no to him again, that he would kill me.

It's impossible to describe the power he had over me.

It was terrifying.

Saying no to my dad always had very, very, very bad consequences in my past.

In Erik's memory, there was one change that escalated everything.

From the moment when my mother told me that she killed, that moment was the end for me.

One of the ways that I coped this child was the belief that I was protecting my mom.

Or that I was protecting her from this secret, that if she knew, she'd have to do something about it.

And certainly just disintegrate the family.

So I believed that I had been protecting her.

And that she could not possibly knew, because my mom loved me.

And if my mom loved me, then she couldn't allow this to happen to me.

So when she told me that she knew, I was just so stunned that I didn't, I didn't know what to do.

I, everything collapsed.

And I believed that, that my parents would kill me after that.

At that point, everything that my father had told me that he would do, I believed that he would do.

He had programmed my mind, he had programmed me, I believe, that if I told, I would die.

And if my mom knew, there was nothing to stop it.

Eric told me he felt helpless, like there was no good way forward, no way he could feel safe.

Then, on Sunday night, he felt everything came to a head.

The whole week, it was escalating, the fines, the arguments all the time.

But that night, you wanted to get out, and they didn't let you.

I remember a few things very clearly.

I remember my dad ordering me up to my room, that he was going to be there in a minute.

I remember not wanting to go up to my room, so they were in the foyer, my brother and my father and my mother.

And there was this huge argument in the foyer, who wanted to leave the house, and they were not letting us leave the house.

And I was being ordered up to my room, and my dad was going to come up.

And I remember walking up the stairs, not wanting to walk up the stairs, but being unable to stop myself.

And I remember Lyle running up the stairs, and he tried to express the thought, that I can't let dad come to my room, I can't do it.

And him telling me it's happening now, what's happening now.

And all I had in my head was, if my mom and dad exit that room before I get there, I'm going to die.

So far in telling this story, I have painted a picture from what the brothers told me.

But for all the moments after, we have court testimony, crime scene photos and confessions.

On that Sunday night, when Lyle met Erik at the top of the stairs, they made a decision.

The brothers grabbed the shotguns they bought.

They walked into the family room.

Their parents were sitting on the couch.

A bowl of ice cream sat on the coffee table while they watched TV.

Lyle and Erik opened fire.

The two brothers shot Jose in the head six times from behind, at close range.

They shot their mother, Kitty, ten times in similar fashion.

To fire a shotgun that many times in a row, you have to reload.

And that is what Lyle did.

He left the house and went out to his car to reload with more shells before returning to the living room where he continued to fire on his mother.

The crime scene was absolutely horrific.

Buckshot and blood had made the family's living room a nightmare.

I don't remember all of my movements.

I know I ran into the den.

I know it was dark and I can't remember.

I can't remember the heart.

That fist, that fist...

That's horrible.

That's horrible.

I committed the worst sin in my life.

And so I never want to give any excuse or justification for my crime, no matter what my dad was doing to me.

I know that that violence can never be an excuse.

I took the lives of two people that I loved.

After it happened, when did you realize or how did you realize that it was no turning back?

You know, when you broke something like a glass or a bottle or something like that, there's, it happens to me at least, there's a second when you think that you can make time go back and fix it.

But at some point, you realize that it's broken, it's done.

When...

I remember that moment.

Yeah, you told me.

I remember that moment very clearly.

Afterwards, I was in a daze.

I was...

I was in a kind of a shell shock situation.

I remember collapsing on the stairs.

Lyle was slouched against the wall.

And I started crying.

We didn't run away.

We didn't leave.

I assumed that the police would be there at any moment.

You have a shot glass in the middle of the Beverly Hills on a Sunday night.

The police response time should have been almost immediate.

And so, when they weren't, it was just this eerie silence, just this horrible, lingering silence.

But I was still in these shocked days.

I couldn't really think.

I had to rely on Lyle to do any kind of real thinking.

And I was crying, but I was just sort of walking in this daze.

And as the night progressed, because we had no alibi, we had no, the people we were supposed to meet that night, all they were, I would tell the police, is that we didn't show up.

So, we had the opposite of an alibi.

We had two people that day we were supposed to meet with them, and we didn't show, so we must have been somewhere else.

To put together some sort of alibi, the brothers went to the movies that night.

Just the two of them.

I was moving in sort of automatic pilot, but then I just started breaking down at the end of the evening.

And we went home.

Lyle was going to call the police on 9-1-1, because the police had still not shown up.

And I walked into the den.

I was just sort of, I was poor.

It was like I was compelled to go into the den.

I couldn't imagine that this was real.

I couldn't imagine that this had happened.

And I started screaming.

And Lyle was telling me to get out of the den.

And I saw him, I saw, I saw the shot.

And it was the most horrible, horrific, terrible sight a human being could see that I could ever, ever imagine.

And it didn't even hit me that I had done this.

Is the person still there?

What happened?

We have units around, what happened?

Who shot who?

You came home and found who shot?

Do you know if they're still in the house, the people that did the shooting?

Okay, hey, let me talk to Erik.

Who is the person that was shot?

My mom and my dad.

Your mom and dad?

Okay, hold on a second.

Okay, we're on our way over there.

Hours after the shooting, police finally responded to the scene.

But the brothers weren't taking into custody.

They weren't given a gun residue test.

They weren't asked for an alibi.

Eight months would go by before the two would be taken into police custody.

I'm not going to say they were incompetent.

I think that's unfair.

The level of Erik's emotion that was so obviously real, it didn't occur to them that maybe this was a crime of passion based on some kind of family, horrific family event, and that's why Erik was emotional.

That would have been made sense, and then they would have gave us a gun residue test.

But they were just looking at it as, there's no way that this kid killed his parents cold bloodedly, or for money or anything like that.

Because of that, they just were sympathetic.

And wanting to get it over with and get Erik back out of there and back home, and aborted the interviews early, and just accepted kind of nonsensical answers about maybe it was the mafia or whatever it is, and I was telling him at the top of my head.

It still didn't hit me until I was in the police station.

I had curled up under the chair, and I was shaking and crying, and I just wanted to go back.

You have 60 seconds remaining.

I wanted to reverse everything, and it was dawning on me.

I had done this, and then I remembered the detective saying that my parents were dead, and I just, I just broke down.

I just started sobbing, and that was the moment.

That was the moment.

Then I realized that I had, I had committed this devastating treason.

That was the worst moment of my life.

I'm, I was responsible for their death.

As my relationship with Lyle and Erik developed, I had to come to terms with the reality that the men I was speaking with, that I was getting to know intimately, had committed such a horrible crime.

I was beginning to learn that so much of the way they spoke about their family, about their father, Jose in particular, was framed as if he were a god, a legend larger than life.

Jose's control seemed to be fueled by his belief in the legacy of the Menendez family bloodline and the mythos he created around it.

To truly understand the brothers, I wanted to explore the scars of their childhood and unpack what it meant to be a Menendez.

That's next on The Menendez Brothers, The Official Podcast.

You know, my father, I mean, we talked about religion, my father believed in reincarnation.

When he's talking about Greeks, as if he was there.

And so his belief that there's a strong, this bloodline and this sort of presence that he was in life and history is beyond his life.

It is powerful.

If you or someone you know has experienced sexual abuse, information and resources are available at www.wannatalkaboutit.com.

The Menendez Brothers, The Official Podcast is brought to you by Netflix and Campfire Studios in partnership with Pod People and narrated by me, Alejandro Hartmann.

It is written and produced by Angela Palladino with help from Tony Mantia, Rebecca Chazón, Natalie Grillo, Sam Gebauer, Alex Vickmanos and Amy Machado.

Executive produced by Ross M.

Dinerstein and Rebecca Evans from Campfire Studios and David Markowitz from Netflix.

Edited by Carter Wogan and Morgan Fuss.

Sound design and mix by Carter Wogan.

Music composition by Jimmy Stoffer.

You can find all episodes of The Menendez Brothers The Official Podcast by searching for You Can't Make This Up wherever you get your podcasts.

If you or someone you know has experienced sexual abuse, information and resources are available at www.wannatalkaboutit.com.

American Criminal is hosted, edited, and executive produced by me, Jeremy Schwartz, Sound design by Matthew Filler, Music by Thrum.

This episode is written and researched by Joel Callan, Managing Producer Emily Burke.

Executive producers are Joel Callan, William Simpson, and Lindsey Graham for Airship.