The Menendez murders

[Alistair]

^ I don't know about being raped, but they were in the same prison for a short time but were transferred to separate prisons. They're still very close, but haven't seen each other for almost 30 years.

one got married in prison didn't he?

 

[Benvolio]

I have never believed the abuse claim. They killed for the money, then made up the abuse story in an attempt to create a defense self defense. I still wonder if their lawyer did not invent the story--unethical, but she seems the type.

 

[gsdx]

How so? They were both old enough they could have left the household. They didn't need to stay in an abusive situation. I can't see sexual abuse ever being a justifiable reason for killing someone

They were already threatened with being disinherited. Leaving home would have sealed the deal.

one got married in prison didn't he?

Both did. I don't know who Lyle married, but Erik married a penpal who wrote to him often.

 

[Alistair]

They were already threatened with being disinherited. Leaving home would have sealed the deal.

Oh, the poor babies. My bad, that's all the reason they need to kill their parents

 

[gsdx]

^ The 'empty' threat had hung over their heads for a very long time, but, according to the film, it came to a head when Lyle, home for a visit from his Ivy League school, confronted his father. The threats became real. Erik soon found weapons hidden by his parents and, after he told Lyle, the seeds were planted in his head that his parents were out to kill them. Things moved very swiftly from there.

 

[rareboy]

How so? They were both old enough they could have left the household. They didn't need to stay in an abusive situation. I can't see sexual abuse ever being a justifiable reason for killing someone

I'm big on revenge......

 

[Cormac135]

^ Oh Cormy! You're such a laugh riot!

Rape is a serious business.

I remember half-watching some tv film about them, they came across as vile little cunts who killed their parents for the inheritance, i didn't believe for a minute they'd been touched up.

 

[medic1]

All we can do is speculate on the circumstances. The father was most certainly a domineering bully, but why kill the mother as well, if not for the money.

I can vaguely remember watching some of the trial, i don't know which one. The tears and hysterics from the brothers just did not ring true with me.

Arseholes and opinions we all have them.

 

[LeicsDom]

I watched a Lifetime movie about the Menendez murders. It was a curious case in its time and I was wondering how they would handle the movie. As I thought they would, they focused only on the father's domineering and demanding personality and his predatory sexual abuse of his sons with main focus on Eric, the younger brother. In the movie, Lyle convinced Eric that their father was out to kill them and made the plans to kill them first.

They also focused on Eric's visits with his psychiatrist and his hallucinations of his dead mother who he loved very much, but apparently hated her for not protecting him from his father.

During the trial, they glossed over the brothers' wild spending sprees following the funerals and focused the testimony on the sexual abuse which we don't really know if it happened or if it was all in Eric's mind, probably panted there by his older brother, Lyle.

Lyle was a dominating personality over Eric, who adored his brother and depended on him to protect him. Lyle was also, at least according to the movie, the only person to stand up to his father.

After seeing the film, I believe that the father had an immensely overpowering personality. He wanted what was best for his boys but went about it the wrong way. Were the sexual assaults real? Perhaps, but I don't think that was the reason the parents were murdered. I believe Lyle felt he was going to be disowned and written out of the will. With his father dead, his mother would inherit the Menendez fortune. For him to inherit the money, both would have to die.

I think Lyle orchestrated the whole thing and preyed upon Eric's mental insecurities to be part of it.

Your thoughts?

Or maybe, Lyle was jealous of the attention Eric was getting from their father .... who can tell?

 

[moniker]

I remember this trial at the time it happened and pay no attention to the revisionist B.S. intended strictly as entertainment. At the time it was almost universally believed they would be found guilty in the first trial. They were not because a juror became emotionally attached to one of the boys. In the second trial justice was done.

 

[NotHardUp1]

Of course we can try them in the court of public opinion, but they were convicted in the real courts. Life sentences, consecutive, without possibility of parole.

 

[NotHardUp1]

If the abuse actually happened, then all the more tragic for the family, and for the murderers. However, they murdered, and not in self-defense.

Not knowing any of the parties involved makes it difficult to form any substantive opinion.

As a matter of reason, sympathies lie with the parents in the public's mind, as they were not able to mount their own defense against allegations of abuse. It is very hard to ignore the wealth and the deadbeat aspect of at least Lyle Menendez. It surely stokes the suspicions that ill-gotten gains would fix his problems.

Additionally, Erik's threats of violence against his psychologist that led to the arrests also earn no pity.

What is even more damaging is the ongoing focus on and sympathy for the brothers. Their parents lie murdered, in their graves now 30 years, but attention is doled out for the murderers.

Abuse or no abuse, the murders were in cold blood. Hatred is not a defense.

 

[bankside]

Not knowing any of the parties involved makes it difficult to form any substantive opinion.
[edit]
Abuse or no abuse, the murders were in cold blood. Hatred is not a defense.

These are the two parts I can't reconcile in my mind and why I withhold judgment.

It lends itself to a few thought experiments though, and it reminds me of a thread we had a while back where some father discovered his toddler being raped by a man, and the father killed the rapist in the course of rescuing his child. There was much back-and-forth as to whether it was a justifiable use of force, which left me a bit baffled.

My bottom line there was that if a person can stop a toddler from being raped, they may use as much force as reason or fear or anger will summon in the moment, and their obligation to pause long enough to calibrate a "proportionate" amount of force is exactly zero. Moreover their obligation to calm down once the rapist has been successfully removed from the child is very nearly zero for quite some time.

Leads me to a few conclusions here too.

 

[NotHardUp1]

That's just it. The boys were not juveniles, not held hostage, never claimed to have been hostage, and never made allegations the whole time they were in college and away.

Assuming the abuse ever did occur, it was another factor in deciding to murder the parents, but it doesn't hold water to suggest it was a pure motive.

The sentencing jury did not think it a motive at all. They placed the motive squarely on greed. Multiple appeals in several courts have all failed to find any merit in the brothers' claims.

 

[eastofeden]

Having made a decision to stand up to my parents and not keep their secrets...I know just doing that how people react to anyone who fucks with the image we all have of families....and they don't like it. I know what I am talking about.

I didn't kill mine...but just for telling the truth I heard....

"You only have one set of parents" (THANK FUCKING GOD)
"They did the best they could"
"If you ever have kids you will see how hard it is"
"Maybe your memory is fuzzy"
"Now I know both of them..they couldn't have possibly...blah blah blah"

No will will address the actual events....too unpleasant....so I get why they would have done what they did..and why no one will believe them. You can tell there is a problem because when a stranger molests a child..the pitchforks come out and the crowd goes wild...but when was the last time you saw the same thing when a father did it to his own family which is just as if not more common????

I will tell you when...never.

Not only do I believe them..I believe their cousin. She didn't get any money..or spend any....

Little kids rarely tell anyone because they have been threatened...often the abuser threatens to kill someone they love or have a bond with...

For 15 years..Lyle has been trying to help and support other people who have been sexually abused...not really the MO of someone who killed just for money IMO

http://people.com/crime/menendez-brothers-remain-close-jailhouse-interviews-married/

Both brothers are active in prison life. Erik spends time with terminally ill prisoners; Lyle has been president of the inmate government for more than 15 years and runs a support group for prisoners who have endured childhood sexual abuse.

“We just keep trying to find something positive from the experiences that we had,” Lyle told PEOPLE.

https://www.aol.com/article/news/20...dez-brothers-speaks-out-about-moles/21649912/

A cousin of Lyle and Erik, who were 18 and 21 at the time of the murders, tells ABC News that the brothers' claims that their father was molesting them was something they had shared with her.

Diane Vander Molen alleges when she was spending the summer with the boys in 1976, Lyle, then just 8 years old, told her he feared sleeping in his own bed because his father was touching him inappropriately.

The brothers' molestation claims were central in the sensational 1993 trial. They stand by these claims more than two decades later.

You'd think these callous killers for money would behave alot differently than they have since the trial....

I believed them then..I believe them now...

Oh yeah...I still think they should have been tried for murder....I don't think killing them was the right course of action and they should have been tried...but I can still understand why they did it.

 

[NotHardUp1]

Statistically, more children are abused by family members and acquaintances than by strangers. Law enforcement sees it every day.

Your experience was real, but there are indeed thousands of cases every year in which parents are separated from their children because one or both have abused the children sexually.

Then there are the divorces where it is just a weapon to use in polarizing everyone.

The investigators didn't endorse the brothers' accounts. Their murders were too calculated, too self-serving to earn them any compassion. They hid the weapons, hid evidence, created alibis, and they partied hard. The murders may have involved some revenge for abuse, but there was obviously much more, and it wasn't simple reaction to abuse.

They acted like criminals, and they didn't act like victims or traumatized boys. They acted like greedy bloodthirsty bastards.

As for prison life, they may be what they seem, and they may not. With their sentences, their only hope of freedom is commutation, and it will never come if they do not do something to look exemplary.

Sympathetic with murder is understandable. I believe that was the whole premise of the movie where Jack Lemmon pressed the chalk button on the witness stand to symbolically kill his wife. I honest to God believe that if someone were to kill Trump, I'd visit him in prison for the rest of his life and send money.

 

[Cormac135]

Reminds me of Trump and his kids.

 

[eastofeden]

Statistically, more children are abused by family members and acquaintances than by strangers. Law enforcement sees it every day.

Your experience was real, but there are indeed thousands of cases every year in which parents are separated from their children because one or both have abused the children sexually.

Then there are the divorces where it is just a weapon to use in polarizing everyone.

The investigators didn't endorse the brothers' accounts. Their murders were too calculated, too self-serving to earn them any compassion. They hid the weapons, hid evidence, created alibis, and they partied hard. The murders may have involved some revenge for abuse, but there was obviously much more, and it wasn't simple reaction to abuse.

They acted like criminals, and they didn't act like victims or traumatized boys. They acted like greedy bloodthirsty bastards.

As for prison life, they may be what they seem, and they may not. With their sentences, their only hope of freedom is commutation, and it will never come if they do not do something to look exemplary.

Yes..poor families and families where one or both parents are not socially upstanding citizens...America doesn't mind punishing those people..it is the image of purity they have a problem with.

Hell...we couldn't even touch the Catholic Priests for a long time because they were the "good ones"...the upstanding citizens..and when you come from a "respected" or affluent family...it is far more difficult and unlikely to be removed or have any action taken against them....

I think most kids blame themselves so kids like the Menendez Brothers....they were definitely different...but I am not sure they were greedy....bloodthirsty maybe....and I think victimized and traumatized boys can become scared and withdrawn..or the town bully...and probably anything in between. It depends on the kid. I think they hated their parent's money....just my opinion of course. I have no idea if my opinion is THE truth... but truth or not or something in between....I DEFINITELY have reasonable doubt....

 

[NotHardUp1]

They didn't hate it enough to walk away from it.

I do know what you mean about money often being above the law. We saw much of it in my hometown, to the degree the wealthiest man in town had an abstract lawyer killed to keep his land from being taken away by his cousin in California who had a just claim to part of it.

It is the Maude Crawford disappearance.

But in much lesser cases, many with money walked for crimes when their poorer neighbors went to jail. That's basically the story of white collar crime.

For that matter, the Menendezes did not get the death penalty because they had no criminal records. Beginner's luck.

 

[eastofeden]

They didn't hate it enough to walk away from it.

I do know what you mean about money often being above the law. We saw much of it in my hometown, to the degree the wealthiest man in town had an abstract lawyer killed to keep his land from being taken away by his cousin in California who had a just claim to part of it.

It is the Maude Crawford disappearance.

But in much lesser cases, many with money walked for crimes when their poorer neighbors went to jail. That's basically the story of white collar crime.

For that matter, the Menendezes did not get the death penalty because they had no criminal records. Beginner's luck.

Best example I know of...

One Word....

JonBenet

Stranger breaking in my ass....