Discover the definitive book on the Menendez case—and the primary source material for NBC's Law and Order True Crime: The Menendez Murders. A successful entertainment executive making $2 million a year. His former beauty queen wife. Their two sons on the fast track to success. But it was all a façade. The Menendez saga has captivated the American public since 1989. The killing of José and Kitty Menendez on a quiet Sunday evening in Beverly Hills didn't make the cover of People magazine until the arrest of their sons seven months later, and the case developed an intense cult following. When the first Menendez trial began in July 1993, the public was convinced that Lyle and Erik were a pair of greedy rich kids who had killed loving, devoted parents. But the real story remained buried beneath years of dark secrets. Until now. Journalist Robert Rand, who originally reported on the case for the Miami Herald and Playboy, has followed the Menendez murders from the beginning and has continued investigating and interviewing key sources for 28 years. Rand is the only reporter who covered the original investigation as well as both trials. With unparalleled access to the Menendez family and their history, including interviews with both brothers before and after their arrest, Rand has uncovered extraordinary details that certainly would have changed the fate of the brothers' first-degree murder conviction and sentencing to life without parole. In The Menendez Murders: The Shocking Untold Story of the Menedez Family and the Killings That Stunned the Nation, Rand shares these intimate, never-before-revealed findings, including a deeply disturbing history of child abuse and sexual molestation in the Menendez family going back generations, and the shocking admission O.J. Simpson made to one of the Menendez brothers when they were inmates at the L.A. County Men's Central Jail. Product DetailsISBN-13: 9781946885265 Media Type: Paperback Publisher: BenBella Books Inc. Publication Date: 09-04-2018 Pages: 376 Product Dimensions: 6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 1.10(d)About the Author Robert Rand is an Emmy Award–winning journalist who works in TV, print, and digital media. He began covering the Menendez brothers case for the Miami Herald the day after the killings on August 21, 1989. He was in court daily for both trials and provided analysis for Court TV, ABC, and CBS News. In March 1991, Playboy published Rand's article "The Killing of Jose Menendez." The 14,000-word story was the longest article ever published by Playboy. Rand's print work includes stories contributed to People, The Guardian, Stern, Grazia, and Tropic, the Sunday magazine of the Miami Herald. He covered the William Kennedy Smith rape trial for Paris Match. In July 2016, Rand was hired by Wolf Films as a consultant working on the development of the NBC eight-hour limited series Law & Order True Crime: The Menendez Murders, which aired in the fall of 2017. Rand's unpublished manuscript of The Menendez Murders provided the primary source material for the series. Rand has appeared as the primary interview in dozens of documentaries about the Menendez case, including ABC 20/20's "Truth and Lies: The Menendez Brothers" and Dateline NBC's "Unthinkable: The Menendez Murders," which both aired in 2017. Rand was awarded a Los Angeles Emmy Award for two years of stories at KCOP-TV in L.A. about an illegal immigrant who was wrongly convicted. The stories resulted in the overturning of a ten-year-old conviction and the release of the man from jail. He was a member of the Special Assignment investigative reporting group at CBS 2 in L.A. and the I-Team at KYW TV (Philadelphia) that won a Columbia-DuPont Silver Baton Award for a year-long series about wealthy property tax dodgers.Read an Excerpt Read an Excerpt CHAPTER 1 NIGHTMARE ON ELM DRIVE I think that possibly if Lyle and I would have been home, ... if we would've been able to do something about it, maybe ... uh, maybe my dad would be alive. Uh, maybe I'd be dead. You know, I mean, I don't know. I-I-I wish ... I definitely would give my life for my dad's. — ERIK MENENDEZ speaking to author in October 1989, two months after the death of Jose and Kitty Menendez On the night of August 20, 1989, the last in the lives of Jose and Kitty Menendez, their elegant residential street in Beverly Hills was so still you could hear a leaf drop. That in itself was not unusual or suspicious. People pay a steep price to live in such neighborhoods, and they cherish their peace and quiet. That particular Sunday was a leisurely, relaxed day around the house for the Menendezes, an affluent couple in their mid-forties. Jose, a powerfully built, handsome Cuban emigre who left Havana at age sixteen, was the chief executive of LIVE Entertainment, a leading Hollywood home video distributor. He sat on the board of LIVE's parent company, Carolco Pictures, producer of the Rambo and Terminator movies. Mary Louise, who'd been called "Kitty" since she was a child, was a stay-at-home mother. Their two college-age sons, Erik and Lyle, spent the day swimming and playing tennis behind the family's lushly landscaped 9,000-square-foot, eight-bedroom beige Mediterranean-style mansion at 722 North Elm Drive in a fashionable neighborhood just below Sunset Boulevard. Eight months earlier, the Menendez family had moved to Beverly Hills from Calabasas, a suburb northwest of Los Angeles. Before that, they'd spent a dozen years living in the Princeton, New Jersey, area. In June 1989, eighteen-year-old Erik graduated from Beverly Hills High School. He was about to enroll at the University of California–Los Angeles and planned to commute to UCLA's nearby Westwood campus. Twenty-one-year-old Lyle was a student at Princeton University. Both young men were highly ranked amateur tennis players with professional aspirations. * * * When Perry Berman arrived at his West Hollywood apartment just after 1 PM, on August 20, 1989, there was an answering machine message from Lyle Menendez. Berman, a friend and former tennis coach of the brothers, had frequently met them for movies or dinner since moving to California from New Jersey. When Berman returned the call, Jose Menendez told him Erik and Lyle were out shopping at the Beverly Center, a nearby upscale shopping mall. Lyle called Berman back around 5 PM and suggested they get together that evening. Berman was planning to attend the Taste of L.A., a food festival in Santa Monica. He was leaving within the hour and invited Erik and Lyle to join him and a friend, Todd Hall. The brothers were going to the movies, said Lyle, to see Batman. He suggested they all meet about 10 PM at the food festival. After eating dinner at home, the brothers walked out the back gate to Erik's white Ford Escort parked in an alley behind the property and drove to the AMC multiplex at Century City Shopping Center. Around 10 PM, Jose and Kitty were settled in the family room watching a James Bond movie, The Spy Who Loved Me, on a big-screen TV. It was the housekeeper's night off, and they were spending a rare evening alone. People close to the family said the couple's marriage appeared to be improving lately. One relative noticed they were holding hands again, something she hadn't seen since their college days. As he watched the movie, Jose Menendez put his feet up on the coffee table and started to doze off. Kitty was seated next to him. The house was equipped with an alarm system, but Jose rarely turned it on. His sons were always setting it off by accident. Besides, he felt safe in Beverly Hills. The French doors behind the couch were closed. Just after 10 PM, a neighbor, Avrille Krom, heard "popping sounds" like Chinese firecrackers quickly going off in a row. Krom noted the time because she was anxiously waiting for her daughter Jennifer to return at 10:30 from a neighbor's house. Her twelve-year-old son, Josh, was watching a TV movie. He wanted to call 911, but his mother didn't think anything of this noise that barely interrupted the crickets' chirping. The idea of gunshots just didn't fit in this neighborhood. But it wasn't firecrackers. Two people had burst into the Menendez family room through the double doors located off the foyer and begun firing 12-gauge Mossberg shotguns. One of the intruders walked around the back of the couch, put the barrel of the massive gun to the back of Jose's head, and pulled the trigger. Kitty, terror-stricken, turned to find another gun near her mouth. Instinctively, she jumped up and raised a hand to protect herself, but to no avail; a blast catapulted her onto the floor. What transpired in that once welcoming family room was a brutal slaughter of a ferocity rarely seen outside the fields of war. There was blood spatter covering the couch, on the wall, on the wood window louvers, on the coffee table, and throughout the room. Wielding pumpaction shotguns — as opposed to automatic weapons — the killers chose to stand in place and methodically pump shell after shell into the helpless couple. Five blasts hit Jose. In addition to the point-blank shot to his head, he was struck in the chest, upper arm, and left elbow. A "through and through" wound of his left thigh left a gash three inches around. In the robotized language of his autopsy, the "brain had been predominantly eviscerated" by the "explosive decapitation" of the gaping gunshot wound. Kitty tried to escape from her attackers but was found lying on her right side, a few feet away from her husband's feet, her face an unrecognizable, gelatinous mass. Every bone in her face was broken. Most of her teeth were shattered. She was ripped apart by nine, possibly ten shots. One almost severed her right thumb. Her left leg, with a large wound at the knee, was broken and bent at a 45-degree angle. Her right leg was stretched out along the bottom shelf of the coffee table. Kitty's sweat-shirt and pants were soaked with blood. * * * Across town in Santa Monica, Perry Ber