PinnedUpdated Aug. 23, 2025, 12:03 a.m. ETLyle Menendez was denied parole on Friday, one day after his brother, Erik, was handed the same fate by a different panel of California parole commissioners.The decisions close off a path to freedom for the brothers, more than three decades after they murdered their parents inside the family’s home in Beverly Hills, Calif.Similar to its decision with Erik, the board said Lyle could try for parole again in three years. It is still possible for the brothers to seek clemency from Gov. Gavin Newsom of California. They could also continue their efforts to get a judge to reduce their convictions or grant them a new trial.The case became a national fascination in the 1990s, and again in recent years after documentaries, docudramas and works of journalism revealed the extent of the abuse that their father inflicted on them, leading to calls for their release.Here are the details:The proceedings: Lyle Menendez, 57, appearing from prison on video, faced hours of questioning from a panel of two parole board commissioners, who made the decision on his case.The rationale: In handing down the panel’s decision Friday, board members said they believed the murders carried out by Lyle demonstrated a remarkable level of callousness and disregard for others. They also cited what they said was a pattern of recent misconduct in prison by Lyle.Family support: As was the case on Thursday, the commissioners heard Friday from representatives of the brothers’ extended family who supported their release. A prosecutor from the Los Angeles District Attorney’s Office opposed parole.Erik’s fate: After a 10-hour hearing on Thursday, a different panel of commissioners found that Erik had “not been a model prisoner,” deciding that he should remain behind bars for at least three more years.A shocking crime: Lyle’s hearing came almost 36 years to the day after he and Erik marched into their living room with shotguns on Aug. 20, 1989, and opened fire on their parents, Jose and Kitty Menendez. The case transfixed the country for its lurid violence against a backdrop of wealth and privilege in one of the country’s most exclusive enclaves.Trial by television: The brothers were tried together, but judged by separate juries, each of which deadlocked. It was one of the first trials televised to a national audience, foreshadowing the country’s obsession with the O.J. Simpson trial a year later. The brothers were convicted after a retrial, which was not televised.Long odds: This was Lyle Menendez’s first appearance before the parole board, after being resentenced by a judge this spring to allow the possibility of early release. Most inmates are rejected for parole the first time they appear, although the percentage granted early release has risen in recent years as criminal justice reforms have opened up new opportunities.Aug. 23, 2025, 12:13 a.m. ETThe Richard J. Donovan Correctional Facility in San Diego, where Erik and Lyle Menendez are serving their sentences.Credit...Mike Blake/ReutersThe members of the panel that handed down Friday evening’s decision denying Lyle Menendez parole said that the murders he committed were “callous” and cited his “deception” and disregard for rules.“We find your remorse is genuine. In many ways, you look like you’ve been a model inmate,” Julie Garland, the parole commissioner overseeing Lyle Menendez’s hearing, said, noting that Lyle had “demonstrated the potential for change.” But she added that “you still struggle with antisocial personality traits” that lie beneath the surface.As had been the case with Lyle’s brother, Erik Menendez, a day earlier, commissioners criticized Lyle for thinking that their father, Jose, posed such a considerable threat to their lives. And, as they did with Erik, they cited Lyle’s continuing illegal use of a cellphone while in prison. They added that Lyle was not only possessing cellphones but selling them.Incarcerated people who break rules are more likely to do so after re-entering society, the panel said. “Citizens are expected to follow the rules whether or not there is some incentive to do so,” Ms. Garland added.To be successful at a future parole hearing, Lyle Menendez needed to address what they said was a criminal way of thinking, which included his cellphone violations.The panel did give great weight to the fact that Lyle Menendez was under the age of 26 at the time of the crimes and very susceptible to what they acknowledged could be a negative and dysfunctional environment created by his father.Ultimately, the panel said, Lyle Menendez needs to be the person he shows he is when he is running programs for other inmates.“Don’t ever not have hope,” she said, adding that Friday’s denial was “not the end.”“It’s a way for you to spend some time to demonstrate, to practice what you preach about who you are, who you want to be,” Ms. Garland added. “Don’t be somebody different behind closed doors.”Aug. 23, 2025, 12:05 a.m. ETTim ArangoReporting from Los AngelesA typical parole hearing lasts two to four hours, but Lyle Menendez’s hearing stretched on for nearly 11 hours. It was interrupted in the evening when the participants learned that an audio recording of his brother Erik’s hearing from Thursday had been released to the public. Menendez’s family was outraged, and the proceeding restarted only after the state corrections agency agreed to withhold an audio recording of Friday’s hearing to allow for a court challenge.Aug. 22, 2025, 11:55 p.m. ETThe Menendez brothers, Lyle, left, and Erik, earned college degrees in prison and participated in a range of classes and programs. Credit...Nick Ut/Associated PressWhile in prison, Erik and Lyle Menendez have earned degrees from the University of California, Irvine, and have pursued rehabilitation through a variety of programs, classes and projects.Erik has overseen groups that focus on meditation, addiction and alternatives to violence, and has worked in hospice care helping older inmates. Lyle, though, has tended to take a broader approach.“Almost like a C.E.O. of a company,” said Gabe Rosales, who teaches guitar and songwriting to prisoners and has known the brothers for years.Lyle has taken more ambitious leadership roles while incarcerated, serving as a liaison between the inmate population and the prison administration, working to secure more inmate privileges. He has also been involved in inmate government, and once worked with administrators to help racially integrate housing.And at the Richard J. Donovan Correctional Facility near San Diego, he oversaw an effort to redesign the physical space of the prison, with landscaping, murals and an outdoor area for training therapy dogs.While commissioners overseeing Erik’s parole hearing praised him for the groups he participated in and the classes he completed, they said they were concerned by his illegal cellphone usage. Cellphones, like controlled substances and weapons, are considered contraband.Lyle, on Friday, faced similar questioning about cellphones.Patrick Reardon, the deputy commissioner on the parole panel, described an “inconsistency” between Lyle’s projects and his role on the inmate advisory council, saying Lyle’s constant possession of a cellphone fit a pattern of deceit.Lyle said he had turned to cellphones to communicate with the outside world once he moved in 2018 to R.J. Donovan, where he was reunited with his brother. He was suddenly far away from his wife. And, he said, he was worried that prison staff would sell information about him to the news media that they learned from monitoring his calls over the prison phone system.Lyle said that after the television series “Law & Order True Crime: The Menendez Murders” was released in 2017, he noticed that staff showed greater interest in what he was doing.Lyle said he started thinking about the consequences of illegal cellphones only last fall, when the district attorney of Los Angeles filed a petition in support of his resentencing, even though he had already lost his right to conjugal visits with his wife over cellphone violations. Up until then, he believed he would never leave prison, having been sentenced to life without parole.A cellphone, he said, made his life “exponentially better and more connected.”Still, Lyle’s overall disciplinary record in prison appeared better than Erik’s. He had infractions for drugs, as well as fighting on two occasions and participating in a tax fraud scheme behind bars.Aug. 22, 2025, 11:41 p.m. ETTim ArangoReporting from Los AngelesJulie Garland, the commissioner on the state panel, said she considered the fact that Lyle Menendez’s cellphone violations stopped only after a legal process was underway that led to his sentence being reduced from life without parole. “Citizens are expected to follow the rules whether or not there is some incentive to do so,” she said.Aug. 22, 2025, 11:35 p.m. ETTim ArangoReporting from Los AngelesThe family of Lyle Menendez released a statement shortly after the proceeding concluded. “While we are of course disappointed by today’s decision as well, we are not discouraged,” it said. They vowed to continue fighting for his release and for the release of his brother, Erik Menendez, in future parole hearings and a habeas petition that is under review by a Los Angeles court.Aug. 22, 2025, 11:30 p.m. ETTim ArangoReporting from Los AngelesJulie Garland, the commissioner, said the murders by the brothers showed a “remarkable level of callousness and disregard for others.” She also cited Lyle Menendez’s illegal use of cellphones inside prison.Aug. 22, 2025, 11:21 p.m. ETLyle, left, and Erik Menendez in 1990.Credit...Nick Ut/Associated PressDespite the similar outcome, Lyle Menendez’s parole hearing was different from his brother’s from the moment it began.After watching Erik Menendez be denied parole a day earlier, Lyle’s parole attorney, Heidi Rummel, on Friday noted that the board on Thursday did not ask many questions about the trauma Erik has said he endured.Julie Garland, the parole commissioner overseeing Lyle’s hearing, then appeared to adopt a different approach and tone from the commissioner who oversaw Erik’s hearing when she began her own questioning.She noted that the documents submitted on Lyle’s behalf were “clearly heartfelt, well-written, informative.” And with her first question, she asked Lyle whether the sexual abuse he had endured had affected his decision-making.“It was confusing, caused a lot of shame in me,” Lyle said. “That pretty much characterized my relationship with my father.”Ms. Garland would go on to question Lyle about many of the same topics Erik was asked about: his criminal history, including burglaries; his purchase of guns; and his concerns about money. Like his brother, Lyle was also interrogated about his behavior in prison and his illegal use of cellphones — violations that commissioners cited in denying Erik parole. And there were times the commissioners cut Lyle off or interjected, seeming to have lost patience with him.But perhaps in an effort to avoid his brother’s fate, Lyle often tried different approaches when commissioners asked him questions on topics they cited Thursday as among the reasons they denied Erik parole.When discussing his relationship with his mother, Lyle made clear that she had sexually abused him, a revelation that had been raised in the first murder trial. He said he no longer believed that his parents were going to kill him imminently at the time he and Erik murdered them, though Lyle did say that “at the time, I had that honest belief.”Lyle also offered a new explanation for why he used cellphones in prison: He wanted privacy for his calls because he was worried that the prison staff members who monitored his conversations would sell tidbits to the tabloids.None of his efforts, however, helped him secure a different outcome from his brother.Aug. 22, 2025, 11:15 p.m. ETErik, left, and Lyle Menendez.Credit...Los Angeles Times, via Getty ImagesIn 1996, the Menendez brothers were found guilty of first-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison without parole for killing their parents, Jose, a music executive, and Mary Louise, a former beauty queen who went by Kitty.It was their second trial. Two years earlier, a mistrial was declared after separate juries — one for each brother — deadlocked over a verdict.The trials proceeded quite differently.In the first, defense lawyers asserted that the brothers had killed their parents after years of sexual, physical and emotional abuse by their father and that they feared for their lives. Their mother, they said, knew about the abuse but didn’t stop it.Interviews with jurors after the mistrial revealed that some of them questioned how serious the abuse had been and to what extent it justified their actions.In the second trial, which led to their convictions and in which the brothers were tried in front of a single jury, lawyers for the brothers were limited in what evidence could be presented.The judge, Stanley M. Weisberg, prohibited their lawyers from using the “abuse excuse,” essentially leaving only two options for jurors: an acquittal or a murder conviction.They went with the latter.Aug. 22, 2025, 11:12 p.m. ETTim ArangoReporting from Los AngelesLyle Menendez lost his bid for parole on Friday after a hearing that lasted more than 11 hours.Aug. 21, 2025, 11:23 p.m. ETThe former home of the Menendez family in Beverly Hills, Calif., in December 1993.Credit...Bob Riha, Jr./Getty ImagesOver the past several months, the culture and politics of 1990s America has seemed as much under the legal microscope as the horrific details of the Menendez brothers’ crimes and what witnesses described as the exemplary lives they led in prison ever since.At times, putting that decade on trial felt like a legal strategy by the brothers’ lawyers. In court, their lawyer Mark J. Geragos often invoked the criminal justice policies of the era — punitive long sentences and laws that mandated harsher sentences for repeat offenders, increasing the prison population — and argued that under today’s mores the brothers merited a second chance.When the brothers stormed into the den of their family’s Beverly Hills mansion in the summer of 1989 and killed their parents using shotguns, Los Angeles was on the cusp of a tumultuous era. By the time the brothers went on trial for the first time, in 1993, the city was still reeling from the deadly riots that followed the acquittal of the police officers in the Rodney King case.The first trial was one of the first to be televised gavel to gavel to a national audience and foreshadowed the public’s obsession with the O.J. Simpson trial, and the explosion of true-crime programming today. The brothers were tried together but each with his own jury. They asserted that they had been molested by their father and had killed out of fear. Neither jury could reach a verdict, so a mistrial was declared.By the time the brothers’ second trial began, just after the acquittal of Mr. Simpson in 1995, the judge changed the rules, banning cameras in the courtroom and limiting testimony about sexual abuse. The changes were seen at the time as a reaction to the acquittals of Mr. Simpson and the officers in the Rodney King case, which had embarrassed law enforcement officials. (Years later, a federal appeals court judge suggested that the rules were unfairly changed to improve the chances of a conviction.)Without being able to consider a lesser charge of manslaughter, as the jurors in the first trial could, the jurors convicted the brothers of murder and effectively sentenced them to life without parole.“It was clear politics had a major impact on the second trial,” said Robert Rand, who has covered the case since 1989 and has written the book, “The Menendez Murders.” “Because the D.A.’s office had suffered a string of major high-profile case defeats.”Aug. 21, 2025, 9:48 p.m. ETErik Menendez said he became “addicted” to using cellphones while incarcerated at the Richard J. Donovan Correctional Facility, in San Diego. Credit...Mike Blake/ReutersIn being denied parole, Erik Menendez was hampered in part by a major issue that has long concerned his lawyers and family members: illegal cellphone usage.There was an extensive discussion during Thursday’s hearing about Erik Menendez’s cellphone usage while inside prison. Cellphones, like controlled substances and weapons, are considered contraband. Prison officials say the introduction of cellphones can corrupt staff members, aid drug trafficking and allow gang members to communicate.Robert Barton, the parole commissioner, asked pointed questions about the timing of Mr. Menendez’s persistent use of cellphones, and how he was caught with one late last year even though the legal process to reduce his sentence was already underway.“I really became addicted to the phones,” Mr. Menendez said.In the context of serving life without parole, he said, cellphone usage was “not really harming anyone.”He said he used phones to speak to his wife, listen to music, watch YouTube and view pornography.Mr. Menendez added that when he realized he might have a chance to get out, he said he told himself, “I can’t be doing this.”Still, he added later: “I knew of 50, 60 people that had phones. They were just available.”Mr. Menendez added that phones, which were commonly sold among the inmates, presented an opportunity that he might as well take. “The phones were going to be sold, and I longed for that connection,” he said.Mr. Menendez stressed that he understood the damage that cellphones could do inside prison and the impact it could have on his disciplinary record. But he said that for a long time, it felt worth it.“What I got in terms of the phone and my connection with the outside world was far greater than the consequences of me getting caught with the phone,” he said.