Are we meant to believe Lyle and Erik Menéndez? The short answer is yes. The long answer requires some unpacking.
By the time we finish “Hang Men,” the ninth and final episode of Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan’s crushing true-crime drama Monsters, we’ve encountered ample inconsistencies in the stories told by both Erik and Lyle. Lyle, in particular, looks bad, caught on tape talking about practicing crying and praising his own performance on the stand, writing actual honest to god letters to people asking them to lie in black and white. The revelation that Billionaire Boys’ Club wasn’t just a movie Erik was obsessed with but an adaptation of a case involving an actual honest to god friend of his is a shock, too. And witness after witness testifies that the brothers terrorized the parents and not the other way around — either that, or it was a completely placid household altogether — during their disastrous second trial.
Much of that disaster must be laid at the feet of Leslie Abramson. Her performance at the first trial may have had its weaknesses, some of her own making (for god’s sake ask for a replacement microphone!) and some not (she can’t help being an impressive woman, unfortunately for her), but it was smart, dogged, and tactically sharp. During trial two, the conditions of which have been heavily rigged in the state’s favor by a D.A. still smarting from the O.J. acquittal, Leslie’s so fed up with the system’s bullshit that she objects to nearly every word out of prosecutor David Conn’s (Paul Adelstein) mouth, no matter how pointless and obnoxious this often is. When she has screamingly valid grounds for objection, like the prosecution straight-up lying about who was on her team during trial one, the biased judge can thereby dismiss it without the jury batting an eyelash. Even before we learn she got called out during closing arguments for playing hangman with Erik during the prosecutor’s summation, I’d turned to my wife and said “She’s basically tying the noose around their necks.”
But to we in the audience — and when you’re making a drama, however true to life it is, that’s the jury that matters — the brothers’ own omissions and admissions are what give us pause. Or they would, if you didn’t look at everything else.
Consider Episode 6, the José and Kitty spotlight. For the rest of the show up to that point, we’ve seen things through the perspective of either the brothers, their lawyer, or a reporter with a grudge against them. You could conceivably have argued that we had unreliable narrators on our hands, setting us up for a final-episode twist in perspective. But the José and Kitty episode shows us things through their eyes, the eyes of the victims themselves, and everything we see backs up everything Erik and Lyle say.
Consider who the loudest denunciators of the brothers are. There’s Dominick Dunne, portrayed as a well-intentioned but pompous, blinkered, and somewhat self-hating gasbag. In this episode he says “the race card or the abuse excuse” like a Trump campaign operative and talks about Lyle and Erik in the the gleeful, none-of-this-really-matters way you’d talk about a washed-up pop star. His tragic past is meant to be sympathetic. He is not.
Nor is Leigh, the outspoken juror who takes the “kill the bastards” position during the sentencing phase of the trial. She’s an obvious analog for Ed Begley’s racist Juror 10 in 12 Angry Men, she’s played by Mama’s Family comedian Vicki Lawrence for crying out loud, and she drops dead of apoplexy while screaming about how they should be burned at the stake or whatever. She’s promptly replaced by a thoughtful guy (Patrick Breen) who delivers a soft-spoken speech arguing they should take both their responsibility and the suffering of the brothers seriously. One wonders how things would have gone had he been empaneled all along, since multiple jurors express what can only be described as reasonable doubt, even after they’ve voted to convict.
From season structure to casting to editing, the show uses a variety of techniques to signal that the brothers are telling the truth. However you feel about his other work, it’s inarguable at this point: Nobody handles the slippery nature of the truth in true crime more deftly than Ryan Murphy, who has now produced five of the best true-crime shows ever made.
But there’s a deeper reason to believe that their moments of untrustworthiness are not ultimately to be trusted, one that goes beyond even the testimony of the friends, family, teachers, and coaches who back them up and are ignored. Even in relatively mundane circumstances it can be hard to recall moments of great pain in exact detail, or tempting to strengthen your case by stretching or hiding the truth to back it up. Imagine if you’d had your brain repeatedly pulped against a wall of cruelty and abuse your entire life.
If Lyle and Erik are liars, if they are weird, if they embellish and prevaricate and try to cover their tracks and their bases, if they are unsympathetic and unpredictable and hard to love, if they are killers, it’s because José and Kitty Menéndez made them that way. They lived in a monster factory, the end-product of which was two young men on a boat with their parents, sharing shotgun secrets, saying “Let’s fucking do it.” The monsters turned on their creators.
But not on each other. Before they are vindictively transferred to separate prisons while “Girl I’m Gonna Miss You” plays on the soundtrack once again, they share a moment before their sentencing: Erik helps fix Lyle’s collar and tie. It killed me to see it. It made me cry. In that gentle gesture of kindness they’re just two little boys again, hoping not to be punished. Two little boys, like so many millions of others, who want more than anything to be believed.
Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.
