Original subtitles

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Welcome to "How It Really Happened."

I'm Hill Harper.

It was a hot August night in 1989

when media titan José Menéndez and his wife, Kitty,

were gunned down in cold blood

in their multimillion-dollar Beverly Hills mansion.

The gruesome double murder shocked residents

of this well-heeled hamlet

and would later transfix a nation drawn

to the lurid testimony playing live from a Van Nuys courtroom,

but for the first several months following the murders,

the world would be riveted by one of the most publicized

whodunits in history,

and it was straight out of a Hollywood film noir.

But how did it really happen?

♪♪

Velez-Mitchell: Beverly Hills represents wealth,

represents exclusivity.

Prettiest people, the fanciest cars.

Crimes happen all over L.A., but rarely in Beverly Hills.

Beverly Hills, California, averages two murders a year,

and in August 20, 1989, their quota was filled.

♪♪

The phone rang, and it was the watch commander indicating

that I needed to respond to the station.

They had a double homicide at 722 North Elm.

Reporter: The first patrol car pulls up.

Erik Menéndez is curled up in a ball,

weeping hysterically on the front lawn.

At this time, we have two deceased persons inside,

a male and a female.

They escorted me into the home to show me the crime scene.

As you enter, there is a large double door

directly in front of you.

♪♪

The -- The victims were in their home, you know,

watching TV, having dessert, relaxing.

Apparently, that's where they started shooting

the second they were in the room.

Fogg: Mr. Menéndez was sitting on the couch

and quite a bit of trauma to the legs,

to the head, to the torso, just immense carnage on --

on the body itself.

Just below, on the floor between the coffee table

and the couch, was Mrs. Menéndez, Kitty Menéndez.

In my 38 years in law enforcement,

I've seen murder victims and I've seen suicide victims,

but the condition in which these two bodies were in

just I'll never forget the look.

They were basically unrecognizable.

The way movies depict a crime scene

is tamer often than what it really is.

It's always shocking, the amount of blood.

It's more than you can fathom.

Fogg: Occasionally, you would hear a flop here and a flop there,

and that would've been the tissue falling down from the --

the bookcases or the ceiling.

My partner needed to hold an umbrella over my head and camera

so that it would protect us both

from the types of tissue falling down.

Edmonds: When they picked up José's body,

the brain fell out of his head.

It was just a -- a scene you don't want to see very often.

♪♪

It was quarter to 12:00, 12:00 at night,

and the phone woke us up.

Erik was screaming on the phone, "My father is dead!

My father is dead!"

The house was cordoned off already with that yellow tape.

There was a number of police cars.

They blocked off the traffic, no traffic.

Lyle was on the sidewalk talking to one or two

either policemen or detectives.

The police show up at the scene,

and there are these two distraught sons,

these two boys,

and they've just found their parents murdered.

Lyle and Erik Menéndez, the brothers,

they had a good reputation.

They were good students.

They were great tennis players.

Heffernan: I was quite close to them at that time,

and I felt like they needed me.

We went down to the police station, and I went with them.

I interviewed the two boys, Lyle and Erik,

and Erik was very, very tearful

and told me that they had been to a food festival

and a movie in Santa Monica.

And when they came in, they entered the house,

they found their parents deceased.

I tried to console him and then tried to get information

as to who would've possibly done this.

Camerota: The first hours after the crime,

the police are scrubbing the crime scene,

and they're looking for DNA evidence.

They're looking for fingerprints.

They are looking for eyewitnesses

and for what people might have heard,

particularly when the crime is gunshots.

♪♪

I believe, at 10:00 in the evening,

the neighbors heard a banging

but did not want to get involved.

It sounded like [Imitates gunshots]

Shotgun blasts over and over again --

you're talking, you know, a good 16 shots with a shotgun blast.

Nobody called the police, which is very surprising.

They call on barking dogs all the time in Beverly Hills,

and parking violations.

I remember first hearing

about the Menéndez murders on local TV,

and it seemed completely unreal.

The names of the victims that we have

is Joseph Enrique Menéndez, 45 years old,

and his wife, Mary or Kitty Louise Menéndez,

44 years old.

Who could get into the home and creep up on them

as they're watching TV, you know, in their den?

There was no real struggle.

How did the perpetrator do that?

Reporter: People in this quiet, exclusive neighborhood

remain surprised at the murders.

Woman: It said Beverly Hills,

and I thought it was somewhere else, you know?

Reporter: Why? Why'd you think that?

Well, I didn't think it would be here, right --

right where I come to work at.

After what happened here last night,

some of the neighbors are worried and afraid.

We don't know if this is an isolated incident.

Fogg: There was an urgency that we needed to solve this --

this case, not only for the victims

but for the community at large.

Was it a gang-related type thing?

Was it a Mafia-related type thing?

This was a horrific crime.

Reporter: Police have no conclusive evidence.

Who hated them?

Who had they crossed?

♪♪

Reporter: It happened at this mansion

in the heart of Beverly Hills.

At approximately 11:47 P.M. last night,

we received a call on our 911 emergency line

from the residents stating

that there had been a shooting here.

On the night José and Kitty Menéndez were killed,

Erik and Lyle Menéndez, you know, made this 911 call.

Reporter: All morning, detectives and technicians

from the crime lab continued to look for clues

behind the huge oak doors and the ornate windows.

Heffernan: This was all about loss.

They had lost their parents,

and it was a huge issue of loss and immediate grief.

♪♪

Lyle: It's really hard to describe the --

the feelings, just the shock, just not believing

that this was happening and that my parents were dead.

Rand: There were three memorial services

for José and Kitty Menéndez.

There was a third memorial service that was held

in late September '89,

about a month after the murders,

for the Cuban-American relatives in Miami,

and Erik and Lyle didn't show up.

They told their aunt that they were just too emotional.

♪♪

Camerota: In the days following the crime,

police were confused,

and they were baffled.

You had two dead people in a high-class residential area,

which is like a red light to the press and to this community.

And we had no leads, zero.

Reporter: Is it as much of a mystery to everyone around here

as it seems to be to the police right now?

Yeah.

I mean, we just have no clue how --

how anything like that could -- could happen.

♪♪

The goal was to solve the crime.

We checked everything trying to find some evidence

that possibly the crooks left.

We found quite a bit of shotgun pellets that were left behind,

and those were everything from bird shot,

which is very small, to double-ought buck,

which is very large.

There was some pieces of wadding in there

from the shotgun rounds.

I believe that there were 13 of those that we recovered

throughout the floor, but the interesting fact

was the expended cartridge cases were all picked up.

And fingerprints on a plastic shotgun shell

would be pretty darn good for fingerprints.

So it was a very calculated move on the suspects' part

of trying to collect as much evidence as possible.

Why they didn't pick up the -- the wadding, I don't know.

Camerota: So when a crime happens in Beverly Hills,

the first kind of snap judgement you would make is,

"Oh, robbery. This involves money."

There were no apparent signs of a forced entry.

We're uncertain, as of this time,

as to how whoever committed the crime

actually got into the home.

Curtis: Was it a robbery? Probably not,

because we don't believe there was any property missing.

The next thing the police have to do is,

what could be the connection between the murderers

and the victims?

There were a lot of signs at the scene

that indicated there was some type of relationship,

that the killer and the victims knew each other in some way.

A lot of the shooting occurred very close

because Mr. Menéndez was sitting on the couch,

and right on the arm of the couch was a remote

that did not fall off.

Also, the coffee table immediately in front

of both victims,

the items on that were not disturbed,

so the shooters were very, very close-range, point-blank.

Camerota: They would start looking at Kitty and José Menéndez

about who their enemies were.

The initial media speculation about the Menéndez murders

was that it was somehow related to the entertainment business.

Curtis: It's my understanding that it was the two boys,

Erik and Lyle, who also indicated early on

that this might be a Mafia involvement.

Johnson: When José and Kitty were murdered,

the original idea was that it was supposedly

because José's business dealings

previously had an arm of their company

that dealt in soft-core porn.

I was, at the time, working in a suburban bureau

of theLos Angeles Times,

and I was covering the pornography industry.

There had been a previous mob hit of a pornographer

in Los Angeles just the year before,

and I started looking into the allegations of a mob hit.

Reporter: TheLos Angeles Times is reporting organized crime

may have played a part in the murders.

So Doug Plog and I went to Newark...

...and interviewed a guy that was part of organized crime.

He said, "We wouldn't have been as messy,"

because we described to him what happened,

"And we wouldn't have killed his wife."

Reporter: Police have no conclusive evidence

that the shooting was mob-related

and would not comment on the alleged mob connection

other than to say they are not ruling it out.

There was speculation in the media that,

because José was Latino,

that there was some type of drug connection.

So then we profiled José to see if he had any connections,

and it was all dead-end stuff.

Camerota: At the same time the police are doing

their investigation,

these twoL.A. Times print reporters,

who were looking into this very spectacular,

gruesome case, the reporters went to talk to the brothers.

When confronted with a sensational murder,

you want to talk to the family.

My colleague, Ron Soble, and I visited them at their mansion.

It had been only a few weeks, and so I walked in fully

expecting to see two traumatized young men,

and with Lyle, there -- there wasn't any trace of that.

He had some ideas to start businesses.

He was much more interested in talking about his business plans

than he was about what happened with his father and mother.

Erik took his cues from Lyle in trying to show that he was,

you know, ready to assume the mantle of adulthood.

We had a strong suspicion at that point

that there was something Lyle and Erik were not telling.

Something wasn't right.

Bye!

Bye, everyone!

♪♪

♪♪

My editor at theMiami Herald wanted me to write a biography

about the fascinating life of José Menéndez,

Cuban-American rags-to-riches success story

that ended in this horrible tragedy.

We lost a friend as -- as well as a -- a --

a business associate.

Rand: The people that worked with him

at Live Entertainment tended --

tended to like José very much, admire him very much.

José worked like a demon to succeed in America,

and he did.

♪♪

Reporter: 45-year-old José Menéndez

was a talented, tough-minded show-business exec.

When he left Cuba at 16, he was penniless.

Well, José was the youngest child in a family in Cuba.

Although they weren't rich,

they were certainly a well-respected family

and considered themselves part of the Cuban elite.

When Castro came to power, they lost everything they --

they had, and, you know, his family gradually,

one after the other, left Cuba.

The company is broad-based,

and it provides pretty much what the consumer wants.

Edmonds: He started off working at Hertz as an executive

and worked himself up like a rocket,

really a brilliant guy.

Rand: When José Menéndez was a top executive

with Hertz Rent a Car,

O.J. Simpson actually came for dinner one night

to the Menéndez home in Princeton, New Jersey,

and he met Erik and Lyle Menéndez

when they were young boys, and from Hertz,

he was named head of RCA Records.

José Menéndez, he was very successful,

but it came out that he also had a bit of a dark side.

Johnson: Everybody who encountered him

said one of two things about him.

He could charm anyone and, at the same time,

could be the most brutal boss

that anybody had ever worked for.

Vicary: At work, he was a holy terror.

I mean, he would yell, scream, degrade, insult,

and the employees were terrified of him.

It began to raise questions

about what kind of person he was behind closed doors.

Reporter: 47-year-old Kitty Menéndez

was a former small-town beauty queen

who met her future husband at a college debating class.

When José met her, you know, he --

he was a brash, handsome guy with wavy, dark hair, 6'1",

and he swept her right off her feet.

Camerota: According to Lyle, her son,

Kitty Menéndez was miserable in her marriage,

and she wasn't trying to hide that.

It's very hard not to feel for Kitty.

She seemed trapped in a marriage she didn't know what to do about

with a man who was obviously very difficult.

Kitty Menéndez was the doormat in the family,

and she allowed everyone in the family

to treat her like a doormat.

I think that the father treated her with no respect,

and therefore her sons treated her with no respect.

José did, to his associates,

praise his sons filled with admiration.

At the same time, it was filled with expectation.

Vicary: The first thing were the indoctrination of the sons

by the father, who would sit them down

in a chair in the basement for hours at a time.

Johnson: Especially Lyle.

Apparently, he would, like, almost put his forehead

against his forehead and, like,

to try to inculcate in him his winner-take-all philosophy.

Vicary: The Menéndez family was like a royal family,

that, "We were better than other people,

that we were athletically gifted.

We were smarter."

Johnson: I think the most dangerous thing he did

was to teach them the lesson that if you want something,

go for it, and don't worry about what you may do to people.

Things began to escalate.

The ends justifies the means,

and that's what he taught his kids.

♪♪

Rand: About a year and a half

before José and Kitty were killed,

Erik and Lyle Menéndez were involved

in some burglaries in Calabasas where the family was living.

These two had more of a checkered past

than the family ever let on.

Johnson: One of their friend's parents had gone away.

From what I understand, it was Lyle's idea

to break into the house and steal jewelry from the people.

It's a way of directing their frustration

and resentment and anger and acting out.

In an attempt to keep Lyle Menéndez out of trouble,

because he was over 18, basically,

Erik Menéndez took the fall for these burglaries in Calabasas,

and José Menéndez made a deal with the DA's office

that Erik would be charged as a juvenile.

They couldn't stay in Calabasas

because their sons had burgled the neighbor's houses,

and so they moved to Beverly Hills.

For them, that was the ultimate in showing success.

Rand: When the Menéndez family moved to Beverly Hills,

one of Kitty's closest friends said,

"Kitty, you finally made it.

You've got your 90210 zip code."

Kitty: Erik?

Hello, everyone out there in TV land!

Rand: This was a family that was perfect on the outside,

but the perfect family turned out

to actually be a nightmare in real life.

Bye! Bye, everyone!

Who could've brutally murdered the Hollywood executive

and his beauty-queen wife?

For months, the public breathlessly

followed every lead.

Was it a mob hit, a drug deal gone bad?

They all seemed to be dead ends,

but behind the scenes, the trail was getting hotter.

Beverly Hills police detectives and two newspaper reporters

were zeroing in simultaneously on two prime suspects.

If the secret investigations proved true,

the revelation would rock the case and the country.

♪♪

♪♪

Vicary: This was a horrific crime

in a very prominent family,

and it was a mystery as to what had happened.

In October of 1989, I came out to Los Angeles

to work on my biography of José Menéndez

for theMiami Herald Sunday magazine.

♪♪

Marta Cano, their aunt, said,

"You have to talk to the brothers

to really understand the Menéndez family."

At a certain point in the interview,

I, you know, gently said to Erik, "I --

I need to ask you a few questions

about the night of the murders."

He told me repeatedly how close the family was,

how much he loved his parents,

and he told me what a shock it was to walk in and --

and see his parents.

As we were walking around the house,

straight back from the main foyer

was the room where José and Kitty had been killed,

and I felt a chill as I walked by the room,

and I thought to myself,

"if my parents had been killed in this house,

had been brutally murdered,

I wouldn't be living in this house."

We had put in several interview requests,

and they finally agreed to sit down with us at their mansion.

It started out just as any interview

that any journalist would do with the survivor of a family.

You want to draw them out and see what --

what they might know as -- as much as anything,

and so I finally just asked the --

the question that all of us journalists

are embarrassed to ask, but we ask anyway

because you never know what somebody will say,

which is, "How are you doing?"

And Lyle said, "Well, it's been kind of a long time now,"

and remember, this has only been a couple of months,

"so we're pretty much over it."

The only thing I could compare it to was somebody

who might have lost a pet that they cared about,

but, you know, you can get a new pet.

These two print reporters from theL.A. Times

were not the only ones who were picking up

on the strange response and reaction

from the boys to the crime.

There was just something about them

that did not sit right with me,

especially when I needed to take an inked

set of fingerprints from Lyle Menéndez,

and I asked Lyle, "Can we go into the house.

Is -- Would that be all right?"

As soon as we were in the foyer, he looked over at me,

and he said, "Is that where it happened?"

And I looked at him like,

"You're the one who discovered this, not me."

He looked like he just blew it.

Edmonds: He wanted to know if we had leads

and were solving the crime.

He was overdramatic actually,

and that's when we were starting to --

had our eyebrows up about him.

Behind the scenes, the police were quietly finding clues

that they did not share.

Fogg: There was quite a bit of evidence,

computers that were in the home.

Right around the time of my deadline,

theL.A. Times that Lyle Menéndez

had hired a computer expert to come to the house

and look for a possible will on the family's home computer.

Johnson: We found out that they had hired

a computer expert to come in

and erase the computer file

because Kitty was rewriting the family will,

and she had let it be known

that she was thinking of changing the will

so that they wouldn't be able to inherit anything.

♪♪

The boys were engaging in all sorts of odd behavior.

The boys went to the East Coast, I believe it was in New Jersey,

and started spending large amounts of money,

which seemed unusual.

Fogg: In fact, 3 days after,

they were spending quite a bit of money on lavish items.

Buying Rolex watches. They bought a Porsche car.

They spent a lot of money.

In fact, I think some estimates say that,

in the first 6 or 7 months after the deaths,

they spent $1 million.

That's a lot of money.

They had leased a condo in Marina del Rey

that was part of their insurance settlement.

They lived well.

Edmonds: They bought a restaurant

in Princeton, New Jersey,

a buffalo wing place.

They were spending money like it was --

they were drunken sailors.

Fogg: Not the typical behavior

that someone who just lost their parents would demonstrate.

So all that is incriminating, but police need cold,

hard facts to actually charge somebody.

It's been 3 months, 4 months, 5 months,

6 months, and then boom.

Edmonds: A woman came to the station.

She related a lot of things that only the shooters would know.

That's it. The game is over.

I knew it then.

Camerota: For 7 months, there were no suspects.

The police were hitting dead ends,

and then, in March of 1990,

something happened that changed the whole equation.

Iannone: Over the months, we gathered a lot of evidence.

It has been very circumstantial,

and we were waiting for the glue,

if you will, to bind it all together,

and just recently that glue has come about.

♪♪

Rand: In the first week of March 1990,

Judalon Smyth walked into the Beverly Hills police.

Edmonds: She related a lot of things

that only the shooters would know,

and the key fact that we got out of it was the --

the guns were thrown off Mulholland Highway.

They took the guns, and they drove up to Mulholland Drive,

and they just threw them over the side of a very rural hill.

So we had a team of our S.W.A.T. team

and every detective rappel, checking every slope.

We didn't find any shotguns.

Police never find the weapons,

but they do follow her next lead,

and that is to the place where the guns were purchased.

We went to San Diego, goal being we were going to check

every buy book in the town or the county if we had to.

They visited a lot of gun stores all --

this is just basic good detective work,

and they looked at the registers where people would buy guns.

The second place was a Big 5.

At first glance, it seemed like this was going to be

yet another dead end.

They didn't see the Menéndez boys' names in the register,

but they saw a name of a friend of the Menéndez boys.

Edmonds: And the purchase of two Mossberg 12-gauges

and some ammo.

After that, this case started going together real well.

So the real question for police was, how did this woman,

Judalon Smyth, happen to know so much about this case?

It turns out that Judalon Smyth was the former mistress

of the Menéndez brothers' therapist.

Abrahamson: Just when you think you've heard everything,

you have a spurned girlfriend of the therapist

who may know something,

and the something turned out to be explosive.

Erik becomes, after the homicides,

more and more depressed.

I think Erik was haunted by the murders afterwards,

and I think he needed to talk to --

to people about it.

Reporter: Psychotherapist Jerome Oziel

counseled the brothers.

Johnson: Erik, he trusts Dr. Oziel,

and so he confesses to Dr. Oziel

that they killed their parents.

Evidently, Erik was stressed out from killing his parents,

Lyle not so much.

Lyle immediately rushed over to Dr. Oziel's office.

Vicary: He tells Dr. Oziel,

"I understand what my brother said here,

but I want you to know that this must remain a secret.

If any of this comes out, you're a dead man."

Well, Oziel got scared, and he realized,

"I might get murdered.

I'll be the only one to know."

So Dr. Oziel came up with a plan.

Rand: About a month after Erik Menéndez confessed

to Dr. Oziel,

Dr. Oziel told the brothers one afternoon that,

"I think it would be a good idea if we record an audiotape

of one of our therapy sessions,

and just in case you ever get arrested,

that we'll be able to show that you had remorse,"

and so the brothers agreed.

So he says, "I'll take the audiotape,

and I'll put it in the safe-deposit box,

and nobody has access to that safe-deposit box

unless something happens to me,"

and Dr. Oziel becomes upset and dissatisfied with his mistress,

and he kicks her out.

Rand: The next morning, Judalon Smyth walked into

the Beverly Hills police and said,

"Dr. Oziel has an audiotape

that's in a safe-deposit box in Sherman Oaks with a confession."

Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.

And we got a call at 6:00 in the morning,

and Erik was panicked.

For 7 months, nothing, seems like this is a cold case,

at least to the public,

and then after 7 months, boom, an arrest.

♪♪

Johnson: The Beverly Hills police,

they cordoned off the street.

They were afraid Lyle was going to run.

I think that's why they moved when they did.

And when he got into a car to drive away, they --

they did a -- a stop and arrested him at that time.

Dispatch:One oh seven seven. 22-20.

En route to a vehicle.

On the day that Lyle Menéndez was arrested,

I was actually in West palm beach, Florida,

and I had four or five frantic messages

from the city desk at theMiami Herald,

and they told me that Lyle Menéndez

had just been arrested in Beverly Hills.

Reporter: Erik was believed to be in Israel

playing in a tennis tournament when his brother, Lyle,

was arrested yesterday by police.

Heffernan: We wanted to see if Erik could actually

do this pro-tennis thing, so we went to Israel.

He was in Israel to take part in a tennis tournament.

That was the information that we had.

And then the big question was getting Erik back.

And we got a call at 6:00 in the morning

from Lyle's then attorney,

"You have to leave Israel immediately,

or you will be extradited."

I didn't know what to think, and Erik was panicked.

He said nothing, nothing.

Camerota: The first lawyer that the Menéndez brothers

reached out to and hired was Robert Shapiro.

He ultimately became very famous

because he became part of O.J. Simpson's defense team.

Robert Shapiro negotiated a surrender for Erik Menéndez.

We checked out, went to the airport,

found that there was a flight to London, and the next day,

I flew to L.A.,

and he flew to Miami to see his aunt.

Reporter: 19-year-old Erik Menéndez, accused,

along with his older brother, Lyle,

of the brutal deaths of their parents,

may be about to turn himself in.

We have some unconfirmed reports that he may in fact

be on his way back to the United States.

We don't know what his destination would be

or what his intent is.

His Cuban relatives had to talk him into coming back,

and they said,

"We'll face it with you and do whatever we can to support you,"

and they certainly did that.

They convinced him the right thing to do was turn himself in,

so he and his aunt, Marta, that actually both the brothers

were very close to, flew to Los Angeles,

and he surrendered to authorities.

Judge: Would the defendants please rise?

Reporter: Brothers Lyle and Erik Menéndez late this afternoon

were brought into a Beverly Hills courtroom

and told of the charges against them,

both accused of murdering their father and mother,

José and Kitty Menéndez.

When I heard that the sons, their sons that they had raised

with a silver spoon in their mouths,

were the killers, I wasn't stunned.

I was just disgusted.

Both brothers are being charged with both murders.

We believe that both brothers were involved --

actively involved in the murders.

Both charges are official circumstances

for which you could be sentenced to death.

Do you understand the charges?

Yes, Your Honor.

Rand: It was extremely difficult for the Menéndez family

to process the arrest of Erik and Lyle

for the murders of their parents.

They couldn't believe it.

They said it wasn't possible.

Reporter: You believe strongly in the boys' innocence?

Extremely. You can't --

You cannot imagine how strongly I believe in that.

I -- I cannot --

I don't have words to say how strong I feel

about the complete impossibility of them

having committed the act that they're accused of.

Heffernan: I think anybody that knew these boys

couldn't imagine that they could've shot their parents.

Reporter: 22-year-old Joseph Lyle Menéndez

and his 19-year-old brother, Erik,

were charged earlier this month with two counts of murder each.

The sons were arrested after a warrant

was served on the family psychologist

in search of evidence.

Abrahamson: You had these two boys of privilege

who had gone to a therapist and bared their souls,

thinking that it was going to be kept confidential,

and the next thing you know, there's a big legal fight about

whether everything they said was going to be admissible

against their interest in a court of law.

It was awesome.

On behalf of Erik Menéndez,

we are going to vigorously defend his

right to have a confidential communication

with his therapist.

If the doctor is threatened, then he can breach

patient confidentiality in order to save his own life.

The defense was hoping that, in suppressing the tape,

they could also convince the judge

that Dr. Oziel should not testify,

and the judge made it clear throughout the hearings

that that was not going to happen.

Months after their arrest,

the Menéndez brothers decided to make a change

in their defense team.

Out went Robert Shapiro, and in came Leslie Abramson.

We always assumed that Dr. Oziel

would be part of the case.

That's what litigation is for.

Some you win. Some you lose.

And Leslie was going to --

to take every ounce of her energy,

of her soul to make sure that if the state was going to prove

that these boys were guilty of murder,

that the state was going to have to prove it.

But the DA admits that he is fighting

for every piece of evidence

to convict the two Menéndez brothers

for the sensational murders of their wealthy

Beverly Hills parents.

Rand: Both brothers were calling me occasionally from jail.

They said, "Wait until the trial.

You'll find out what was really happening

in the Menéndez family."

He just said that it was our secret,

that bad things would happen to me if I told anybody.

After 2 years of high-stakes preliminary hearings,

the judge finally allowed Erik and Lyle's sensational audiotape

confessions to be played at trial.

Based on that key piece of evidence alone,

it looked like it would be an open-and-shut case

for the prosecution,

but just before the trial was set to begin in July 1993,

more than 3 years after the murders,

the defense team introduced a shocking new strategy,

which would soon shake the state's case to the core.

The trial that transfixed the nation in part two

of "The Menéndez Brothers: How It Really Happened."

♪♪