Jose Menendez, the father of Erik and Lyle Menendez, was a corporate executive with more money than he could spend.
On the evening of August 20, 1989, all the money in the world meant nothing to Jose when his two young sons shot him and their mother multiple times with a shotgun in the family’s own house in Beverly Hills.
Lyle was arrested on March 8, 1990, and his brother turned himself in three days later. In between the shootings and the arrests, the brothers lived like royalties with the money from the parents they had brutally killed.
In the months after the death of their parents, the Menendez brothers were on a shopping spree. It was estimated they spent around $700,000 of his father’s money.
Lyle bought a Porsche, a Rolex, a restaurant, and a lot of clothing; Erik opted for a Jeep Wrangler, hired a $50,000 personal tennis coach, and invested $40,000 in a rock concert that never happened. Of course, the two took an exotic vacation too.
For Erik and Lyle, killing their parents was like winning a lottery, yet that was not the only disturbing revelation.
10 /10 A Screenplay Called Friends
No, it was not about three men and three women hanging out at a cafe called Central Perk in New York City.
The screenplay that Erik Menendez and his tennis partner Craig Cignarelli wrote was about the story of a person who killed five people, including his parents. They went to a private cabin and produced the 66-page screenplay titled Friends.
There was allegedly another manuscript of the same nature, but with more vivid details and resemblance to the brothers’ ultimate crime.
9 /10 Police Broke Investigation Protocols
Upon arriving at the crime scene, the first responders never doubted that the brothers were indeed grieving.
Erik and Lyle convincingly performed that officers did not even bother checking the brothers’ hands for gunshot residue.
Early reports described the crime scene as “gangland-style killing,” probably because it looked pretty much like one, thanks to an imaginative staging.
Erik and Lyle didn’t sit for a formal interview until two months after their parents’ death. The investigation was compromised from the get-go.