SEEKING JUSTICE ”The brothers are being held without cause at this point,” their attorney, Mark Geragos, argues of Lyle (left) and Erik, in court in 1990.
The letter had gone missing for 30 years. But in 2018, Erik and Lyle Menendez’s aunt Marta Cano found it while going through her late son Andres’ effects. “I’ve been trying to avoid dad. It’s still happening but it’s worse. Every night I stay up thinking he might come in,” Erik wrote his cousin in December 1988. “I’m afraid. You just don’t know dad like I do. He’s crazy!”
Eight months after writing that chilling letter, Erik and his older brother, Lyle, gunned down their parents, Jose and Kitty, while the couple were eating ice cream in front of the TV in the family den. “The killings occurred in imperfect self-defense, after a lifetime of physical and sexual abuse,” their lawyers argued in a May 3 court filing, noting that after the first trial in 1993 ended in a mistrial because of two hung juries, almost all of the testimony about abuse was excluded from the second trial, in 1996. The brothers were convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison without parole.
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