“Someone has killed my parents,” Lyle Menendez said when calling the Beverly Hills police on Aug. 20, 1989. As he wept, he said he didn’t know who the perpetrators were because he “wasn’t there.” When authorities arrived at the crime scene, they found the bodies of José and Mary Louise, who had been shot multiple times. And, taking into account how the investigation and the judicial process developed, Ryan Murphy, author of Dahmer, has decided to focus on Lyle and Erik, the Menéndez brothers, for his franchise of psychopaths for Netflix.
With the title of Monsters: The story of Lyle and Erik Menéndez, the second season of the anthology series aims to narrate the events before and after the crime that marked the media agenda in the United States. Its attraction resided in the profile of the family, wealthy, and the fact that the police considered the sons of crime suspects, especially after seeing that, after the tragedy, they enjoyed a life of waste with the inherited fortune: Rolex, luxury cars, private tennis coaches and trips abroad.
The evidence became irrefutable when Erik confessed to the crime to his therapist, Jerome Oziel, who in turn told the information to his wife, Judalon Smyth. Fearing for their lives because of Lyle, who threatened to kill them, they went to the authorities. They starred in two trials: one televised first, in which they were prosecuted separately, and another in which they were jointly accused, and from which the cameras were kept away.
Netflix has made the announcement of Monsters: The Story of Lyle and Erik Menéndez from a video where you can hear Lyle Menendez’s phone call with his false testimony that he was not present when his parents were murdered. The episodes are expected to hit the platform in 2024. Considering that Ryan Murphy argued that the Monster franchise would focus on murderers whose crimes marked society in some way, it remains to be seen what angle he takes when narrating the episodes. facts.
This continuation of Dahmer makes sense when seeing the success of the miniseries with Evan Peters on Netflix: it accumulated 856 million hours watched in its first four weeks in the catalogue, becoming the third most watched series in the English language after the fourth season. of Stranger things and the first of Wednesday.
And, once this success was seen, Netflix wanted to take advantage of the far-fetched title of the series, Dahmer – Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story, to turn the production into an anthology series that already has a third season confirmed, still without a leading psychopath. . It will not be the second time that Murphy has entered media cases: he has already produced and directed The people vs. O.J. Simpson and The murder of Gianni Versace within the American crime story television franchise, which dissected the figures of O.J. Simpson and Andrew Cunanan respectively.
The new announced project will not be the first time that the Menéndez brothers have inspired audiovisuals either: in 1990, sticking to the facts, Law and Order was inspired by an episode in these murderers. Later, in 2017, Law and Order had a spin-off called Law and Order: True Crime: The Menéndez Murders in which Edie Falco played Leslie Abramson, the defense attorney, who argued that the brothers had been abused by part of José Menéndez and that, in reality, they had acted in legitimate defense.
